I think this is a great point directionally, but hard to make the maths work for the numbers you’ve suggested.
Like, for there to be 100x more incidents of interpersonal misconduct than are reported to CH… well, there’d need to be 1000s of incidents! And there are only a few thousand EAs. It could be that the rate is in the tens of percent, but I’d find that surprising.
Ditto your adjustment for women: to get a 3x adjustment given the amount of women in other spaces:
If the other spaces are 50% women, i.e. representative of gen. pop., then EA would need to be ~17% women for a 3x adjustment to make sense
I guess you might think “professional EA orgs” or something are more male-dominated than EA survey respondents. That seems possible, depending on what you wanna count. One thing is 80k is currently majority-women and I think however you carve it up we’re a big chunk of the space :)
(Edit: that made me curious so I went and counted; assuming I’m right about everyone’s gender then we’re 60% women! I think it was a bit skewed the other way when I joined 4y ago.)
I guess you might think “professional EA orgs” or something are more male-dominated than EA survey respondents. That seems possible, depending on what you wanna count. One thing is 80k is currently majority-women and I think however you carve it up we’re a big chunk of the space :)
Agreed. Fwiw, in EA Survey 2024 data, people currently working at EA orgs are actually significantly more likely to be women or non-binary than those not (36.9% vs 29.1%, p=0.004).
Well put. And as I said in my response I also think the women in other spaces argument could equally cut in the other direction—if we assume harassment is done by men to women, there are more men per woman in EA than comparable spaces.
Re 2 vs 3 - I didn’t want to have to literally whip a calculator out and crunch some stats before making a comment so I just put a squiggly.
Re 100, I think you’re absolutely right. I think I’m off by an order of magnitude or two. I wouldn’t be surprised if there were around 1000 individual incidents, but then I’d only expect a few % to be reported and for them to be grouped together. Tbh, I kinda scimmed the post and didn’t read it throughly enough before commenting :S
I think this is a great point directionally, but hard to make the maths work for the numbers you’ve suggested.
Like, for there to be 100x more incidents of interpersonal misconduct than are reported to CH… well, there’d need to be 1000s of incidents! And there are only a few thousand EAs. It could be that the rate is in the tens of percent, but I’d find that surprising.
Ditto your adjustment for women: to get a 3x adjustment given the amount of women in other spaces:
If the other spaces are 50% women, i.e. representative of gen. pop., then EA would need to be ~17% women for a 3x adjustment to make sense
But EA survey data suggests EA is 26% women
I guess you might think “professional EA orgs” or something are more male-dominated than EA survey respondents. That seems possible, depending on what you wanna count. One thing is 80k is currently majority-women and I think however you carve it up we’re a big chunk of the space :)
(Edit: that made me curious so I went and counted; assuming I’m right about everyone’s gender then we’re 60% women! I think it was a bit skewed the other way when I joined 4y ago.)
Agreed. Fwiw, in EA Survey 2024 data, people currently working at EA orgs are actually significantly more likely to be women or non-binary than those not (36.9% vs 29.1%, p=0.004).
Well put. And as I said in my response I also think the women in other spaces argument could equally cut in the other direction—if we assume harassment is done by men to women, there are more men per woman in EA than comparable spaces.
Re 2 vs 3 - I didn’t want to have to literally whip a calculator out and crunch some stats before making a comment so I just put a squiggly.
Re 100, I think you’re absolutely right. I think I’m off by an order of magnitude or two. I wouldn’t be surprised if there were around 1000 individual incidents, but then I’d only expect a few % to be reported and for them to be grouped together. Tbh, I kinda scimmed the post and didn’t read it throughly enough before commenting :S
So to clarify rather than the number being 300x too low, you think it might be somewhere between 2 − 20x too low?
And you’re saying that you wouldn’t be surprised if there were 1000 annual individual incidents among the 3000 or so EA women.