I’m sceptical that there are substantial benefits to generating AI safety research ideas from gender diversity. I haven’t read the literature here, but my prior on these types of interventions is that the effect size is small.
I regardless think Athena is good for the same reasons Lewis put forward in his comment—the evidence that women are excluded from male-dominated work environments seems strong and it’s very important that we get as many talented researchers into AI safety as possible. This also seems especially like a problem in the AIS community where anecdotal claims of difficulties from unwanted romantic/sexual advances are common.
I think the intellectual benefits from gender diversity claims haven’t been subjected to sufficient scrutiny because it’s convenient to believe. For this kind of claim, I would need to see high-quality causal inference research to believe it and I haven’t seen this research and the article linked doesn’t cite such research. The linked NatGeo article doesn’t seem to me to bring relevant evidence to bear on the question. I completely buy that having more women in the life sciences leads to better medical treatment for women, but that causal mechanism at work here doesn’t seem like it would apply to AI safety research.
Do you have evidence that women are excluded from male-dominated work environments? This large meta-analysis finds that in academia, women need far fewer citations in order to be hired in male dominated subjects, and received a much higher score on tests when their gender was unblinded vs blinded.
…In summary, all of the seven administrative reports reveal substantial evidence that women applicants were at least as successful as and usually more successful than male applicants were—particularly in GEMP fields.
(GEMP: geosciences, engineering, economics, mathematics/computer science, and physical science)
In a natural experiment, French economists used national exam data for 11 fields, focusing on PhD holders who form the core of French academic hiring (Breda & Hillion, 2016). They compared blinded and nonblinded exam scores for the same men and women and discovered that women received higher scores when their gender was known than when it was not when a field was male dominant (math, physics, philosophy), indicating a positive bias, and that this difference strongly increased with a field’s male dominance. Specifically, women’s rank in male-dominated fields increased by up to 40% of a standard deviation. In contrast, male candidates in fields dominated by women (literature, foreign languages) were given a small boost over expectations based on blind ratings, but this difference was small and rarely significant.6
Many organisations have an explicit bias in favour of hiring women. e.g. according to this paper for a given level of performance in econometrics, women are much more likely to be elected fellows of the Econometric Society. This is due to an explicit bias in favour of women in that society.
I think you are bordering on cherry picking here. The meta-analysis studied 6 areas of bias, and found parity in 3, advantage for women in 1, and advantage for men in 2. It also makes no sense to link a particular study when you just linked a meta-analysis: presumably I could dig through and selectively find studies supporting the opposite position.
There is also no mention of the key issue of sexual harassment, which has been the source of most of the gender based complaints in EA, and is compounded in situations of large gender imbalance, just from the pure maths of potential predators vs potential targets.
I agree on the sexual harassment problem and have written about that at length on here.
I don’t think I am cherry picking. The commenter’s claim that I challenged was that women are excluded from male-dominated (eg STEM) environments. With respect to the main post, the question is whether women are excluded from computer science jobs in particular. The paper found that with respect to hiring, biases are in favour of women in a range of STEM disciplines. In computer science in particular, there is evidence either of equal treatment or of a large bias in favour of women.
In computer science, Way et al. (2016) found that more highly ranked departments hired women and men at comparable rates, holding constant publications, department prestige, geography, and postdoc experience.
The Computer Research Association commissioned a national audit of U.S. and Canadian computer-science hiring (Stankovic & Aspray, 2003). They found that new women recipients of PhDs applied for far fewer academic jobs than men: Women with PhDs applied for six positions, whereas men applied for 25 positions. However, female PhDs were offered twice as many interviews per application (0.77), whereas men received only 0.37. Further, women received 0.55 job offers per application, whereas men received only 0.19: “Obviously women were much more selective in where they applied, and also much more successful in the application process” (Stankovic & Aspray, 2003, p. 31).
The same is true for other STEM disciplines. Thus, it is more accurate to say that the evidence suggests that men are on balance excluded from jobs in male-dominated STEM disciplines, in academia at least. I haven’t seen anything about hiring in STEM-related companies.
This is from the author’s own analysis:
If men and women were treated equally in STEM in academia, we would expect the blue and orange line to be overlapping, but the blue line consistently tracks above the orange line, indicating a bias to hiring women.
In their systematic review, the authors cite a range of studies finding similar results in hiring in STEM
Kessel and Nelson (2011) reported that female PhDs had similar or higher probabilities than men of entering assistant professorships in 100 top “highly quantitative” departments but not in other STEM fields. Ceci et al. (2014) compared the percentage of female PhDs with the percentage of female assistant professors 5 to 6 years later in GEMP fields and found similar results. And in philosophy—the humanities field most like GEMP in gender composition and quantitative emphasis—among 2008 to 2019 PhDs, women had a 10% to 17% greater likelihood than men of entering permanent academic placements (Allen-Hermanson, 2017; Kallens et al., 2022).
Among political scientists, Schröder et al. (2021) found that female political scientists had a 20% greater likelihood of obtaining a tenured position than comparably accomplished males in the same cohort after controlling for personal characteristics and accomplishments (publications, grants, children, etc.). Lutter and Schröder (2016) found that women needed 23% to 44% fewer publications than men to obtain a tenured job in German sociology departments
Data from the National Research Council shows that the fraction of women hired in STEM subjects in academia is higher than the number of female applicants across the board.
Data from individual universities confirms this picture:
At the University of Western Ontario, across departments in 1992 to 1999, women constituted 23.2% of applicants, 30.4% of interviewees, and 36.2% of hires for tenuretrack jobs (The University of Western Ontario, Office of the Provost and Vice-President [Academic], 2001). At Simon Fraser University and University of British Columbia in 2001, of 4,525 applicants, women were more likely than men to be one of the 105 hired, comprising 38.9% of applicants but 41.0% of those hired (Kimura, 2002).
An analysis by Moratti (2020) of hiring for the decade from 2007 to 2017 at Norway’s largest university revealed no gender bias in hiring: Seventy-seven searches generated 1,009 applicants for new associate professorships, with women slightly more likely than men to be hired, leading Moratti to conclude that
Only anecdotal and not a peer-reviewed opinion, but after reading a lot of these comments I can see how women might feel excluded from male-dominated spaces. Totally agree that reasoning transparency is important and that it is good to flag such things, but I think there is a difference between flagging some issues and a few people writing essays about how these claims are super wrong, challenging her to bet on her success and that gender diversity actually works etc. At least I find such comments really discouraging and as a women wouldn’t want to start a project in the AI safety / EA space. Also, don’t wanna give the whole classic talk about it’s so much easier to give snappy remarks on the internet than in real life, but maybe think about feedback norms?
Also, just stating that a lot of work that is being done in the AI safety space is based on lesswrong posts and arxiv papers, rather than peer-reviewed studies, so maybe we can give the project a little bit the benefit of the doubt that getting more female AI safety researchers into the space is actually good?
I disagree with this comment and others. A lot of people’s take seems to be that as long as some people think the vibe of something is good, then we should suspend all standards of evidence and argument.
In this case, should we not mention the fact that 75% of the evidence presented making the case for a project is weak? The whole point of the discussion is about whether ‘gender diversity works’ in the sense of improving the performance of organisations in certain domains. It seems like you are saying that it does. If so, then you need to present some evidence and arguments.
If something is ‘superwrong’, doesn’t that make it more important to point that out? Or are you denying that it is superwrong? If so, what are your arguments?
I wrote an ‘essay’ because someone said I was cherrypicking and so I wanted to present all of the evidence presented in the paper without anyone having to read the paper, which I assumed few people would do. Usually on the forum, presenting lots of high quality evidence for something is deemed a positive, not a negative. This is also consistent with my comments on other topics—I often post screenshots and quotes from relevant literature for the simple reason that I think this is good practice, and I don’t see why we should suspend that practice on this topic because it has ‘bad vibes’. The implicit idea behind your suggestion is that instead of citing high quality literature, we should be guided by a vague sense of moral outrage.
I think it is a good norm for nonprofits to precommit to achieving certain outcomes. Or do you disagree?
Regarding feedback norms, I think the reverse is true. I think for the most part people are scared of challenging this sort of thinking for fear of social censure. Notably, this is exactly what has happened here. I personally would express these views in person and have done so several times. I think most people who share these views don’t want to be called bigoted and so don’t bother. It is noteworthy that only around 2-4 people on the forum publicly criticise arguments for demographic favouritism, but that the constituency publicly for it on the forum is much larger. In broader society, the constituency in favour of demographic favouritism has taken over almost the entirety of the public, private and nonprofit sectors. In this context, I think it is strange to be upset by a minimal amount of niche online pushback.
I don’t know why this would make you less keen to start an EA or AI project. If you have a good one, you should be able to get funding for it.
Regarding feedback norms, I think the reverse is true. I think for the most part people are scared of challenging this sort of thinking for fear of social censure. Notably, this is exactly what has happened here. I personally would express these views in person and have done so several times. I think most people who share these views don’t want to be called bigoted and so don’t bother. It is noteworthy that only around 2-4 people on the forum publicly criticise arguments for demographic favouritism, but that the constituency publicly for it on the forum is much larger. In broader society, the constituency in favour of demographic favouritism has taken over almost the entirety of the public, private and nonprofit sectors. In this context, I think it is strange to be upset by a minimal amount of niche online pushback.
I think it might be helpful to take a step back. The default in political or otherwise charged discussions is to believe that your side is the unfairly persecuted and tiny minority[1], and it’s an act of virtue and courage to bravely speak up.
I think self-belief in this position correlates weakly at best with shared social reality; I expect many people on multiple sides will hold near-symmetric beliefs.
In this case, it’s reasonable for you (and many upvoters) to believe that the anti-”demographic favoritism” position is unfairly marginalized and persecuted, in part because you can point to many examples of pro-”demographic favoritism” claims in . Likewise, I also think it’s reasonable for detractors (like anon above and titotal) to believe that pro-”demographic favoritism” are unfairly marginalized and persecuted, in part because the very existence of your comments and (many) upvoters suggest that this is the majority position on the EA Forum, and people who disagree will be disadvantaged and are taking more of a “brave” stance in doing so.
For what it’s worth, I do think local norms tilts more against people who disagree with you. Broadly I think it in fact is harder/more costly on the forum to argue for pro-diversity positions on most sub-issues, at least locally.
That said, I think it’s overall helpful to reduce (but not necessarily abandon) a persecution framing for viewpoints, as it is rarely conducive to useful discussions.
I’m not sure that local norms do tilt in favour of my position. Many EA orgs already have demographically-biased hiring, so it’s fair to say I’m not winning the argument. And there just seem to be a lot more people willing to propose this stuff than criticise it. As I mentioned, the only public pushback comes from 2-4 people, and I do think it is personally costly for me to do this.
I think it is important to consider the social costs of discussing this. Demographic favouritism has ~completely taken over the public, private and nonprofit sector. I think recognising why this has happened requires one to analyse the social costs of opposing it given that at least a significant fraction, if not a majority, of voters are opposed to demographic favouritism. Because people are scared to push back for fear of being called bigoted, weak evidence can be adduced in favour of demographic favouritism. eg People often share things like magazine articles allegedly showing that a gender diverse board increases your stock price.
In this case, weak evidence has been adduced and unsubstantiated claims have been made, and some people have criticised it. The response to this has not been that the criticism is wrong, but that it is wrong to criticise at all in this domain. Several commenters have basically tried to guilt trip the critics even though they don’t disagree with what the critics said. This never happens for any other topic. No-one ever mockingly argues against citing high quality peer reviewed literature in any other domain. No-one ever says correctly criticising obviously bad literature has bad vibes in any other domain.
I think the correct response would not be to get annoyed about the vibes, but to get better evidence and arguments
Note that if she bets on her success and wins, she can extract money from the doubters, in a way which she couldn’t if the doubters restricted themselves to mere talk. The reciprocal is also true, though.
Edit: The original author has deactivated their account so have removed their username from the below. From my pov, the fact that they felt the need to do so is a signal that initiatives like Athena are valuable and worth supporting.
EA Forum, we need to talk. Why does this comment (at time of writing) have a negative vote score?[1] We have separate downvote and disagreevotes for a reason.
Nothing they says in this comment is against Forum Norms. They state very clearly that these are their own thoughts from anecdotes. They’re sharing their perspective on why the relative strong scrutiny in this thread might be off-putting for the very people Athena is meant to target.
From someone who naturally sits more on the ‘contextualising’ side of the Decoupling v Contextualising framework, it’s pretty clear why the response would make some people less keen on proposing or attending programs like this.
I think there’s a broader debate about EAs relationship to ideas of gender diversity and social justice, as well as points of disagreement and agreement on both empirical and philosophy axes. I just don’t think that the right place for such a discussion is the comments here.
I can say why I downvoted it—the commenter argued that presenting good arguments and evidence, and asking for results is bad because they don’t like the vibe and find those things upsetting.
Am also skeptical about the intellectual benefits directly from gender diversity.
However, I think one pretty plausible way it could happen is because women tend to specialise in different fields from men (more women in life sciences, biology, and psychology as opposed to computer science) and maybe the benefits result from the diversity of expertise in different fields. Eg: PIBBS seems to have greater diversity in their fellows than other programmes and it seems like a good idea for it to exist.
Yes I agree with this—but if this is part of the theory of change then Athena should probably privilege applicants with these different backgrounds and I don’t know if they intend to do this.
I’m sceptical that there are substantial benefits to generating AI safety research ideas from gender diversity. I haven’t read the literature here, but my prior on these types of interventions is that the effect size is small.
I regardless think Athena is good for the same reasons Lewis put forward in his comment—the evidence that women are excluded from male-dominated work environments seems strong and it’s very important that we get as many talented researchers into AI safety as possible. This also seems especially like a problem in the AIS community where anecdotal claims of difficulties from unwanted romantic/sexual advances are common.
I think the intellectual benefits from gender diversity claims haven’t been subjected to sufficient scrutiny because it’s convenient to believe. For this kind of claim, I would need to see high-quality causal inference research to believe it and I haven’t seen this research and the article linked doesn’t cite such research. The linked NatGeo article doesn’t seem to me to bring relevant evidence to bear on the question. I completely buy that having more women in the life sciences leads to better medical treatment for women, but that causal mechanism at work here doesn’t seem like it would apply to AI safety research.
Do you have evidence that women are excluded from male-dominated work environments? This large meta-analysis finds that in academia, women need far fewer citations in order to be hired in male dominated subjects, and received a much higher score on tests when their gender was unblinded vs blinded.
(GEMP: geosciences, engineering, economics, mathematics/computer science, and physical science)
Many organisations have an explicit bias in favour of hiring women. e.g. according to this paper for a given level of performance in econometrics, women are much more likely to be elected fellows of the Econometric Society. This is due to an explicit bias in favour of women in that society.
I think you are bordering on cherry picking here. The meta-analysis studied 6 areas of bias, and found parity in 3, advantage for women in 1, and advantage for men in 2. It also makes no sense to link a particular study when you just linked a meta-analysis: presumably I could dig through and selectively find studies supporting the opposite position.
There is also no mention of the key issue of sexual harassment, which has been the source of most of the gender based complaints in EA, and is compounded in situations of large gender imbalance, just from the pure maths of potential predators vs potential targets.
I agree on the sexual harassment problem and have written about that at length on here.
I don’t think I am cherry picking. The commenter’s claim that I challenged was that women are excluded from male-dominated (eg STEM) environments. With respect to the main post, the question is whether women are excluded from computer science jobs in particular. The paper found that with respect to hiring, biases are in favour of women in a range of STEM disciplines. In computer science in particular, there is evidence either of equal treatment or of a large bias in favour of women.
The same is true for other STEM disciplines. Thus, it is more accurate to say that the evidence suggests that men are on balance excluded from jobs in male-dominated STEM disciplines, in academia at least. I haven’t seen anything about hiring in STEM-related companies.
This is from the author’s own analysis:
If men and women were treated equally in STEM in academia, we would expect the blue and orange line to be overlapping, but the blue line consistently tracks above the orange line, indicating a bias to hiring women.
In their systematic review, the authors cite a range of studies finding similar results in hiring in STEM
Data from the National Research Council shows that the fraction of women hired in STEM subjects in academia is higher than the number of female applicants across the board.
Data from individual universities confirms this picture:
Only anecdotal and not a peer-reviewed opinion, but after reading a lot of these comments I can see how women might feel excluded from male-dominated spaces. Totally agree that reasoning transparency is important and that it is good to flag such things, but I think there is a difference between flagging some issues and a few people writing essays about how these claims are super wrong, challenging her to bet on her success and that gender diversity actually works etc. At least I find such comments really discouraging and as a women wouldn’t want to start a project in the AI safety / EA space. Also, don’t wanna give the whole classic talk about it’s so much easier to give snappy remarks on the internet than in real life, but maybe think about feedback norms?
Also, just stating that a lot of work that is being done in the AI safety space is based on lesswrong posts and arxiv papers, rather than peer-reviewed studies, so maybe we can give the project a little bit the benefit of the doubt that getting more female AI safety researchers into the space is actually good?
I disagree with this comment and others. A lot of people’s take seems to be that as long as some people think the vibe of something is good, then we should suspend all standards of evidence and argument.
In this case, should we not mention the fact that 75% of the evidence presented making the case for a project is weak? The whole point of the discussion is about whether ‘gender diversity works’ in the sense of improving the performance of organisations in certain domains. It seems like you are saying that it does. If so, then you need to present some evidence and arguments.
If something is ‘superwrong’, doesn’t that make it more important to point that out? Or are you denying that it is superwrong? If so, what are your arguments?
I wrote an ‘essay’ because someone said I was cherrypicking and so I wanted to present all of the evidence presented in the paper without anyone having to read the paper, which I assumed few people would do. Usually on the forum, presenting lots of high quality evidence for something is deemed a positive, not a negative. This is also consistent with my comments on other topics—I often post screenshots and quotes from relevant literature for the simple reason that I think this is good practice, and I don’t see why we should suspend that practice on this topic because it has ‘bad vibes’. The implicit idea behind your suggestion is that instead of citing high quality literature, we should be guided by a vague sense of moral outrage.
I think it is a good norm for nonprofits to precommit to achieving certain outcomes. Or do you disagree?
Regarding feedback norms, I think the reverse is true. I think for the most part people are scared of challenging this sort of thinking for fear of social censure. Notably, this is exactly what has happened here. I personally would express these views in person and have done so several times. I think most people who share these views don’t want to be called bigoted and so don’t bother. It is noteworthy that only around 2-4 people on the forum publicly criticise arguments for demographic favouritism, but that the constituency publicly for it on the forum is much larger. In broader society, the constituency in favour of demographic favouritism has taken over almost the entirety of the public, private and nonprofit sectors. In this context, I think it is strange to be upset by a minimal amount of niche online pushback.
I don’t know why this would make you less keen to start an EA or AI project. If you have a good one, you should be able to get funding for it.
I think it might be helpful to take a step back. The default in political or otherwise charged discussions is to believe that your side is the unfairly persecuted and tiny minority[1], and it’s an act of virtue and courage to bravely speak up.
I think self-belief in this position correlates weakly at best with shared social reality; I expect many people on multiple sides will hold near-symmetric beliefs.
In this case, it’s reasonable for you (and many upvoters) to believe that the anti-”demographic favoritism” position is unfairly marginalized and persecuted, in part because you can point to many examples of pro-”demographic favoritism” claims in . Likewise, I also think it’s reasonable for detractors (like anon above and titotal) to believe that pro-”demographic favoritism” are unfairly marginalized and persecuted, in part because the very existence of your comments and (many) upvoters suggest that this is the majority position on the EA Forum, and people who disagree will be disadvantaged and are taking more of a “brave” stance in doing so.
For what it’s worth, I do think local norms tilts more against people who disagree with you. Broadly I think it in fact is harder/more costly on the forum to argue for pro-diversity positions on most sub-issues, at least locally.
That said, I think it’s overall helpful to reduce (but not necessarily abandon) a persecution framing for viewpoints, as it is rarely conducive to useful discussions.
See also SSC on Against Bravery Debates.[2]
Or “moral majority” as the case may be, where your side is the long-suffering and silent majority, who doesn’t deign to get into political disputes.
He also had an ever better post about this exact phenomenon, but alas I couldn’t find it after a more extensive search.
I’m not sure that local norms do tilt in favour of my position. Many EA orgs already have demographically-biased hiring, so it’s fair to say I’m not winning the argument. And there just seem to be a lot more people willing to propose this stuff than criticise it. As I mentioned, the only public pushback comes from 2-4 people, and I do think it is personally costly for me to do this.
I think it is important to consider the social costs of discussing this. Demographic favouritism has ~completely taken over the public, private and nonprofit sector. I think recognising why this has happened requires one to analyse the social costs of opposing it given that at least a significant fraction, if not a majority, of voters are opposed to demographic favouritism. Because people are scared to push back for fear of being called bigoted, weak evidence can be adduced in favour of demographic favouritism. eg People often share things like magazine articles allegedly showing that a gender diverse board increases your stock price.
In this case, weak evidence has been adduced and unsubstantiated claims have been made, and some people have criticised it. The response to this has not been that the criticism is wrong, but that it is wrong to criticise at all in this domain. Several commenters have basically tried to guilt trip the critics even though they don’t disagree with what the critics said. This never happens for any other topic. No-one ever mockingly argues against citing high quality peer reviewed literature in any other domain. No-one ever says correctly criticising obviously bad literature has bad vibes in any other domain.
I think the correct response would not be to get annoyed about the vibes, but to get better evidence and arguments
Note that if she bets on her success and wins, she can extract money from the doubters, in a way which she couldn’t if the doubters restricted themselves to mere talk. The reciprocal is also true, though.
Edit: The original author has deactivated their account so have removed their username from the below. From my pov, the fact that they felt the need to do so is a signal that initiatives like Athena are valuable and worth supporting.
EA Forum, we need to talk. Why does this comment (at time of writing) have a negative vote score?[1] We have separate downvote and disagreevotes for a reason.
Nothing they says in this comment is against Forum Norms. They state very clearly that these are their own thoughts from anecdotes. They’re sharing their perspective on why the relative strong scrutiny in this thread might be off-putting for the very people Athena is meant to target.
From someone who naturally sits more on the ‘contextualising’ side of the Decoupling v Contextualising framework, it’s pretty clear why the response would make some people less keen on proposing or attending programs like this.
I think there’s a broader debate about EAs relationship to ideas of gender diversity and social justice, as well as points of disagreement and agreement on both empirical and philosophy axes. I just don’t think that the right place for such a discussion is the comments here.
-10 when I initial started this comment, −3 when I posted
I can say why I downvoted it—the commenter argued that presenting good arguments and evidence, and asking for results is bad because they don’t like the vibe and find those things upsetting.
My views here are just deferring to gender scholars I respect.
Am also skeptical about the intellectual benefits directly from gender diversity.
However, I think one pretty plausible way it could happen is because women tend to specialise in different fields from men (more women in life sciences, biology, and psychology as opposed to computer science) and maybe the benefits result from the diversity of expertise in different fields. Eg: PIBBS seems to have greater diversity in their fellows than other programmes and it seems like a good idea for it to exist.
Yes I agree with this—but if this is part of the theory of change then Athena should probably privilege applicants with these different backgrounds and I don’t know if they intend to do this.