I have been saddened to learn of similarly bad behaviour in other communities I have been involved in. However it’s important not to let the commonness of abuse and harassment in broader society as an excuse not to improve. (I’m 100% not accusing you of this by the way, it’s just a behavior I’ve seen in other places).
EA should not be aiming for a passing grade when it comes to sexual harassment. The question is not “is EA better than average”, but “is EA as good as it could be”. And the answer to that question is no. I deeply hope that the concerns of the women in the article will be listened to.
I agree that EA should aim to be as good as it could be, but comparisons to other communities are still helpful. If the EA community is worse than others at this kind of thing then maybe:
Someone considering joining should seek out other communities of people trying to do good. (Ex: animal-focused work in EA spaces vs the broader animal advocacy world.)
We should start an unaffiliated group (“Impact Maximizers”) that tries to avoid these problems. (Somewhat like the “Atheism Plus” split.)
We should be figuring what we’re doing differently from most other communities and do more normal things instead. (Ex: this post)
[EDIT: this also feeds into how ashamed people should feel about their association with EA given what’s described here.]
I am pretty certain it wasn’t intended that way but:
Some EAs should start an unaffiliated group (“Impact Maximizers”) that tries to avoid these problems. (Somewhat like the “Atheism Plus” split.)
Set off minor alarm bells when reading it, more so than the other bullet points, so I tried to put some thought into why that is (and why I didn’t get the same alarm bells for the other two points).
I think it’s because it (most likely inadvertently) implies “If people already in the movement do not like these power dynamics (around making women feel uncomfortable, up to sexual harrassment etc) then they should leave and start their own movement.”(I am aware this asks for some people, not necessarily women/the specific person concerned by this, to start the group, but this still does not address the potentially lower resources, career and networking opportunities). This can almost be used as an excuse not to fix things, as if people don’t like it they can leave. But, leaving means potentially sacrificing close relationships and career and funding opportunities, at least to some degree. Taken together, this could be taken to mean:
If you are a woman uncomfortable about the current norms on dealing with sexual harrassment, consider leaving/starting your own movement, taking potential career and funding hits to do so.
I fully don’t think you intended this, but please take this as my attempt to put words to why this set off minor alarm bells on first reading, and I would be interested to hear the thoughts of others. (It is also possible that that bullet point was in response to a previous comment, which I may not have read in enough depth).
The first and third bullet point do not have this same issue, as the first one does not explicitly reduce existing opportunities for people (i.e. someone considering joining EA does not have as much if anything already invested in it, although may reduce future opportunities if they would benefit a lot from getting more involved in EA), and the third bullet point speaks about making improvements.
I think you’re just playing in to a broader cultural problem here. Too many younger EAs are too invested in getting a job at an EA organization, and/or in having the movement as a part of their identity (as distinct from the underlying ideal). If you think the movement has serious flaws that make it not a good means for doing the most good, then you should not be trying to work for an EA org in the first place, and the access to those opportunities is irrelevant.
People should not be using the movement for career advancement independent of the goal of doing the most good they can do with their careers (and in most cases, can’t do that even if they intend to, because EA org jobs that are high-status within the movement are not similarly high-status outside of it).
I find the EA movement a useful source of ideas and a useful place to find potential collaborators for some of my projects, but I have no interest in working for an EA org because that’s not where I expect I’d have the biggest impact. I think the movement as a whole would be more successful, and a lot of younger EAs would be a lot happier, if they approached the movement with this level of detachment.
I believe you are conflating several things here. But first, a little tip on phrasing responses: putting the word ‘just’ in front of a critical response makes it more dismissive than you might have intended.
If you think the movement has serious flaws that make it not a good means for doing the most good, then you should not be trying to work for an EA org in the first place, and the access to those opportunities is irrelevant.
Agreed to that as stated, but I think this is a straw man. Things can both be bad in some ways, and better than some other options, but that doesn’t mean any flaws should be dismissed. This could even go to the extreme of (hypothetically) ‘I know I can have the highest impact if I work here, so I will bear the inappropriate attention of my colleagues/will leave and not have the highest impact I can’.
People should not be using the movement for career advancement independent of the goal of doing the most good they can do with their careers (and in most cases, can’t do that even if they intend to, because EA org jobs that are high-status within the movement are not similarly high-status outside of it) [..] I find the EA movement a useful source of ideas and a useful place to find potential collaborators for some of my projects, but I have no interest in working for an EA org because that’s not where I expect I’d have the biggest impact.
Some people may think that working at an EA org is the highest impact thing they could be doing (even if just for the short term), and career paths are very dependent on the individual. EA basically brands itself as the way to do the most good, so it should not be surprising if people hold this view. I was writing up my first comment it was with the broad assumption of ‘connections/opportunities within EA = connections/opportunities that help you do the most good’ (given the EA forum audience), not as a judgement of ‘EA is the only way of having a high impact’ (which is a different conversation).
I think the movement as a whole would be more successful, and a lot of younger EAs would be a lot happier, if they approached the movement with this level of detachment.
I also have thoughts on this one, but this again is a different conversation. EA is not the only way to have a very high impact, but this should not be used as an excuse for avoiding improvements.
Hmm, yes, that’s not what I was trying to say. Edited to change “Some EAs” to “We”, to make it clearer that this is not addressed specifically to people who have experienced harassment.
The first and third bullet point do not have this same issue, as the first one does not explicitly reduce existing opportunities for people
I think this is probably not true: there are probably people considering joining EA who would find EA a much easier place to get funding than their other best opportunities for trying to do the kind of good they think most needs doing.
(Overall, what I was trying to communicate with my comment is that how EA compares to other communities is something that would be relevant to decisions many people might be making.)
I don’t think changing “some EAs” to “we” necessarily changes my point of ‘people concerned should not have to move to a different community which may have fewer resources/opportunities’, independent of who actually creates that different community.
Note that my bigger point overall was why the second bullet point set off alarm bells, rather than specific points on the others (mostly included as a reference, and less thought put into the wording). That said:
there are probably people considering joining EA who would find EA a much easier place to get funding than their other best opportunities for trying to do the kind of good they think most needs doing.
I agree with this. I added “although may reduce future opportunities if they would benefit a lot from getting more involved in EA” after “i.e. someone considering joining EA does not have as much if anything already invested in it” a couple of minutes after originally posting my comment to reflect a very similar sentiment (however likely after you had already seen and started writing your response).
However, there is very much a difference between losing something that you have, and not gaining something that you could potentially have. When talking about personal cost, one is significantly higher than the other (agreed that both are bad), as is the toll of potentially broken trust and losing close relationships. It could potentially also have an impact cost ignoring social factors,e.g. if people have built up career/social capital that is very useful within EA, but not ranked as highly outside of EA/is not linked with the relevant people outside of EA, rather e.g. than building up non-EA networks.
That bullet point is also written as ‘someone considering joining’ rather than ‘we should’. ‘Someone considering joining’ may or may not join for a variety of reasons, and is a potential consequence to the community but not an action point. It is the action points/how action is approached that seem more relevant here.
should not have to move to a different community which may have fewer resources/opportunities
To be clear, I’m very much in favor of efforts to make EA better here. I think the CEA Community Health Team’s (disclosure: my wife is on that team) work is important, that many EAs need to be more aware of how power dynamics impact relationships (disclosure again), and that fixing this should not primarily fall on the people impacted.
I added “although …” a couple of minutes after originally posting my comment to reflect a very similar sentiment (however likely after you had already seen and started writing your response).
That’s right, sorry!
I also think the second bullet point is probably not a good idea even if we did know that EA has higher rates of this sort of issues than you’d expect: Atheism Plus didn’t go very well! I’m not saying that any of the three points are things that would definitely be worth doing in that world, but they’re an illustration about how the information of whether EA does have higher rates would be relevant to decisions people might make.
That’s good to hear re in favour of efforts to make EA better (edited for clarity). Thanks for your engagement on this.
Agreed with the necessity for awareness around power dynamics with the nuance of fixing this not having to fall on the people impacted by it. I found it good to see that post when it came out as it points out things people may not have been aware of.
I strongly agree here. As far as I know (but I have limited experience), EA does better than all other social movements I have been a part of (animal advocacy, new atheism) on the question of sexual harassment. But I still think we have much room to improve—we should.
Funnily enough, I think EA does worse than other communities / movements I’m involved with (grassroots animal advocacy & environmentalism). My partner and other friends (women) have often complained about various sexist issues when attending EA events e.g. men talking over them, borderline aggressive physical closeness, dismissing their ideas, etc., to the point that they doesn’t want to engage with the community. Experiences like this rarely, if ever, happen in other communities we hang out in. I think there are a few reasons for why EA has been worse than other communities in my cases:
I think our experiences differ on animal issues as when groups /movements professionalise, as has been happening over the past decade for animal welfare, the likelihood that men will abuse their positions of power increases dramatically. At the more grassroots level, power imbalances often aren’t stark enough to lead the types of issues that came out in the animal movement a few years back. EA has also been undergoing this professionalisation and consolidation of power, and seems like the article above highlights the negative consequences of that.
As has been noted many times, EA is currently about 70% male, whilst environmentalism/animal advocacy is majority women. I would be fairly confident that a more balanced gender ratio would mean less misogyny towards women.
Some EAs have a kind of “anti-woke” sentiment to the point where I actually think it could be fairly damaging e.g. it causes people to think issues related to race, gender, nationality etc aren’t important at all. I think it would be pretty valuable if everyone read a few core texts on things like racism, sexism, ableism, etc. to actually understand the every-day experiences of people facing various forms of discrimination and bigotry.
Pointing out the %70 male number seems very relevant since issues like this may contribute to that number and will likely push other women (such as myself) away from the movement.
While I haven’t experienced men in EA being dismissive of my ideas (though that’s only my personal experience in a very small EA community) I have found that the people I have met in EA are much more open to talking about sex and sexual experiences than I am comfortable with in a professional environment. I have personally had a colleague in EA ask me to go to a sex party to try BDSM sex toys. This was very strange for me. I have worked as a teacher, as a health care professional, and have spent a lot of time in academic settings, and I have never had an experience like that elsewhere. I also felt that it was being asked because they were sussing out whether or not I was part of the “cool crowd” who was open about my sex life and willing to be experimental.
I found this especially strange because there seem to be a lot of norms around conversation in EA (the same person who asked me to go to that party has strong feelings about up-keeping these norms) but they for some reason don’t have norms around speaking about sexual relationships, which is taboo in every other professional setting I have been a part of. I think having stronger “norms” or whatever you want to call it, or making discussions like this more taboo in EA, would be a good start. This will make it less likely that people in EA will feel
comfortable doing the things discussed in this article.
I have found that the people I have met in EA are much more open to talking about sex and sexual experiences than I am comfortable with in a professional environment. I have personally had a colleague in EA ask me to go to a sex party to try BDSM sex toys.
I would guess this is a mixture of
Founder effects: Sexuality being a topic of discussion in communities which were precursors to EA. EA didn’t originate as a professional community.
Openness to weird ideas: The idea that buying a $40K car instead of a $30K car means you gave up an opportunity to save a life is pretty weird. The idea that vast numbers of people could exist in the future and our overwhelming moral priority should be to ensure that they’re living happy lives is pretty weird. The idea that shrimp welfare is super important is pretty weird. These are all intense, extraordinary conversation topics. Polls show most people masturbate. Most of us don’t talk about it. But if anyone talks about it, I imagine it’s a person who is comfortable with (or even delights in) intense, extraordinary conversations more generally.
fwiw, I haven’t personally experienced this much in EA; my guess is that individual variation in local groups explains more of the difference than any EA-wide thing.
EA may not have originated as a professional community, but it is one now. And that means raising the standards and changing the norms to exclude behavior such as the ones described above.
Thanks for sharing your experience and that of your partner. I agree that experiences here can differ dramatically. And I admit I in particular have very limited experience with discrimination by nature of being a white man in a position of power in my community.
I definitely have seen men talking over women and dismissing their ideas within EA and this does bother me and I do try to point it out when I see it (e.g, “Hey I think Sarah wanted to make a point here”).
I do personally think a more balanced gender ratio would be helpful for improving EA culture and would love to do what I can to recruit and retain women into EA.
While I do agree that “woke” and “cancel culture” can have some excesses, I am incredibly disappointed to see these excesses used to dismiss any possibility of a legitimate point about a particular axis of race/gender/nationality/language/etc. disparities, and I currently see this as the bigger problem in EA right now.
While I think these behaviours are antisocial, it seems preemptive to label them as sexist without looking at whether they’re unique to women. As a man, I’ve had many men and some (though a smaller proportion of) women talk over me or dismiss my ideas. I consider it jerkish behaviour—and quite possibly more common among EAs than the population at large—and I try to discourage it when I see it done to others (I usually don’t it mind too much in a 1-on-1) but it doesn’t seem obviously mysogynistic.
(Borderline aggressive physical closeness sounds more likely to be gender specific)
I’m not super familiar with the idea, but I think the idea here is that many people (unconsciously or otherwise) think that women are easier to interrupt, dismiss, or talk over. It’s the bias that’s sexist, not the act itself.
You could make that claim, but then it should be evidenced. Personally I have noticed my tendency (which I try to suppress!) is more readily to interrupt/dismiss people who are shorter than me, which seems to accord with the data.
I think the evidence is there to the same extent as your height evidence:
We find a number of significant differences, including the fact that women are more often interrupted overall and that men interrupt more often women than other men, in particular using speech overlap to grab the floor (Eecke & Fernández, 2016 “On the Influence of Gender on Interruptions in Multiparty Dialogue”)
It also matches my personal experience.
I think there’s a natural reason to feel defensive when faced with this since it carries the label “sexist” which kinda takes a wide range of badness of behavior under one label, but I think this is frequently an unconscious bias people have so I don’t mean it to suggest you or others are bad people, but just that we can do better.
That evidence wouldn’t explain why (or show that) EAs would be more sexist. The behaviour James Ozden describes sounds consistent with, for example, EA containing a higher proportion of aspy types who, generally lacking some awareness of social norms, are more inclined to talk over everyone.
You seem to be really hung up on the term “sexist” and I think I get that. I think it’s very clear there is unintentional and unconscious sexism in the EA movement, like there is everywhere else. I’m not calling anyone bad. But I am going to throw a “Isolated Demand For Rigor, Five Yard Penalty” at your argument here.
Of course there’s sexism (unconscious and otherwise) in the EA movement.
But with the very strong caveat that I believe citing logical fallacies can lead to nothing more productive than arguments over whether the fallacy was correctly cited, I submit that this whole thread is a discussion about whether sexism is more than averagely prevalent in EA (for healthy reference classes), and, therefore whether EAs should put more resources into the problem.
In that context, I would argue the latter is the isolated demand for rigour, for which I’m making an in-context demand for justification.
[ETA: for the record I weakly agree that we should put more resources into the problem. I just don’t want us to sabotage our epistemics while making that determination]
I’m sorry I’m very confused what we are supposed to be discussing. I thought earlier you were arguing that there’s no sexism in EA because people who are interrupting women could just be interrupting people with lower height or just interrupting everyone equally. I was arguing against that.
I’m personally not saying “EA is more sexist than relevant reference classes”. I don’t think I believe that, or it would depend a lot on the reference class… and there appears to be notable within-EA variation.
I probably am saying “we should put more resources into figuring out sexism in EA”, but that’s not what I thought we were talking about, and of course I’d want to think a lot more about what that’s supposed to look like, what “more” means, what “resources” means, what “figuring out sexism” means, etc.
I certainly didn’t mean to claim that. I’ve known of multiple examples of sexism in EA. I think the comment to which I originally replied might not have been another such example, and wanted to guard against assuming it was.
As has been noted many times, EA is currently about 70% male, whilst environmentalism/animal advocacy is majority women. I would be fairly confident that a more balanced gender ratio would mean less misogyny towards women.
I don’t think the 70⁄30 gender ratio causes misogyny. I think it amplifies experiences of it among women because they are the minority here. Imagine a group of 100 EAs, 70 men and 30 women, and a group of 100 environmentalists, 30 men and 70 women. Suppose 10% of all men do something misogynistic towards a random woman in their group. Then 23% of EA women experience misogyny compared to only 4% of environmentalist women, even though each individual man in each group is equally likely to have behaved misogynistically.
(Prior to seeing this post, I’d have conjectured that men in EA are less likely than men elsewhere to behave misogynistically, and maybe that’s still true, but these reports are really alarming.)
Suppose 10% of all men do something misogynistic towards a random woman in their group.
If instead you model it as X% of all men do something misogynistic toward women they encounter instead of as toward a random woman in the group you end up with something much less skewed.
I think that both modeling choices would make sense depending on which specific type of misogyny is the concern. For example, interruptions would seem likely to fit your model better, while asking a woman out in an inappropriate manner might be fit by the random group member model better.
Although I think that the group size is realistically going to be smaller than 100 in almost all cases, often far smaller, which would also lead to less skew.
Edit: although if instead of considering how many women experience >0 instances of (significant) misogyny, and instead consider how much misogyny on average each woman experiences, then it would go back to being heavily skewed by the proportion of genders in each group.
Ozden comment contains great (but predictable) points.
He also packs in his self-interested argument, into this extremely important/sensitive heated discussion:
I think our experiences differ on animal issues as when groups /movements professionalise, as has been happening over the past decade for animal welfare, the likelihood that men will abuse their positions of power increases dramatically. At the more grassroots level, power imbalances often aren’t stark enough to lead the types of issues that came out in the animal movement a few years back. EA has also been undergoing this professionalisation and consolidation of power, and seems like the article above highlights the negative consequences of that.
Don’t have a lot of time to explain, but this isn’t true, it’s almost the opposite.
The power structures in distributed movements exist and are controlled in different ways, sometimes producing pretty bad behavior but with more dubious leadership/management.
DxE, for example, had an almost existential problem with sexual misconduct/abuse. This was probably connected to second-tier leaders and the distributed, chapter-like system, as opposed to Wayne actively courting it.
When I spoke to Wayne (and the subsequent leadership), they pointed to reforms such as central sexual harassment policies and enforcing a better culture. While I don’t know how substantive these reforms were, something like this would be probably involved in a true solution. Being “top down” helps a lot, as well as having a professionalized staff/leadership to execute this.
Don’t have time to put in an essay, but there’s a much longer thread here about distributed movement and power, and also a separate thread here about sexual harassment and animal advocacy. On the latter point, we got multiple layers of a nightmarish “motte and bailey” that is ongoing—we’re approaching the point of non-viability in attaching EA to us.
Incredibly, these articles aren’t in the top 5 things I would need to communicate to EAs right now.
On the plus side, Ozden’s comment did produce a great thread by Lauren Maria, who is a thoughtful and brilliant leader.
Just wanted to point out that Peter and you seem to mention two different classes of behaviors. While the behaviors you mention certainly create a more unwelcoming environment to women and shouldn’t be welcome in EA environmens, I don’t think they would meet the (legal ?) definition of sexual harassment and may not be the types of actions Peter had in mind.
As has been noted many times, EA is currently about 70% male, whilst environmentalism/animal advocacy is majority women. I would be fairly confident that a more balanced gender ratio would mean less misogyny towards women.
My guess is that EA is currently male because aggressively quantifying and measuring charitable giving is an activity that appeals primarily to men. As long as that remains true, and Effective Altruism remains Effective Altruism in that way, my prediction is that the gender ratio will remain the same, just as most hobbies and social groups maintain similar gender ratios over time even when people work really hard to change them. If this form of harassment is inherent to male-dominated activities then that would be pretty sad.
Some EAs have a kind of “anti-woke” sentiment to the point where I actually think it could be fairly damaging e.g. it causes people to think issues related to race, gender, nationality etc aren’t important at all. I think it would be pretty valuable if everyone read a few core texts on things like racism, sexism, ableism, etc. to actually understand the every-day experiences of people facing various forms of discrimination and bigotry.
I’m pretty sure the standard left-American take on everyday harrassment is straightforwardly compatible with believing it’s not very important in a world with existential risk and malaria and the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, and that this is a sensible position for EAs to hold even when they’re not explicitly “anti-woke”.
I strong disagreed (but did not downvote) this comment for a few reasons:
(1) I don’t think there’s any evidence that EA is an inherently and immutably male activity, and we shouldn’t assume such. EA is currently male-skewed, yes, but I was involved in a college “venture philanthropy” group that involved explicit rankings of non-profit organizations (quite similar to EA in many ways) and it was female-skewed, and I’ve observed this in my broader experiences with venture philanthropy (though don’t have statistics to confirm). There’s a lot of ways EA can end up male-skewed (or venture philanthropy can end up female-skewed) without it being an inherently and immutably male or an inherently and immutably female activity.
(2) Even if EA is an inherently and immutably male-leaning activity in general (which I don’t necessarily agree with per above), there’s a lot of value in finding ways to involve the remaining ~50% of the population, so surely we’d want to find ways to make it less male-leaning on the margin. Thus writing off the idea of being more inclusive to men seems needlessly dismissive and reductive and leaves a lot of impact and opportunity on the table.
(3) If you care about achieving impact on existential risk, malaria, and even the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, it would be very helpful to have a healthy, robust, and impactful community to work on these problems. Being more inclusive to non-men would improve EA on all three of these axes and thus paying attention to at least some claims currently referred to as “woke” or “leftist” would improve on all three axes. (To be clear, I don’t consider myself “leftist” but I still take many of these kinds of concern very seriously.)
(1) I don’t think there’s any evidence that EA is an inherently male activity, and we shouldn’t assume such.
There’s at least some evidence, in that it’s a tradition that is currently mostly participated in by men. I don’t know exactly what you mean by “inherently” or what brand of evidence you’re looking for, but it’s not really relevant to the discussion that the cause for the difference in interest be biological or social or whatever. These sorts of gender ratios seem hard to “correct” when it comes to C.S. departments and Magic the Gathering tournaments, and my guess is that with EA it will be similar. If someone wants to prove me wrong then I’d welcome the attempt.
(2) Even if EA is a male-leaning activity (which I don’t necessarily agree with per above), there’s a lot of value in finding ways to involve the remaining ~50% of the population, so surely we’d want to find ways to make it less male-leaning on the margin.
Well, that depends, doesn’t it? If “making EA less male-leaning on the margin” means coming up with fewer WELLBYs, then plausibly “making EA less male” means making EA less able to accomplish its goals.
Often what I’ve seen academic departments do to attract women into STEM is to exaggerate the interpersonal aspects of a given profession and downplay the nerdy stuff. This ends up being only moderately harmful because the women take the intro classes, decide they’re not interested for reasons completely divorced from social expectations, and then choose something different. But when it comes to a charitable organization, downplaying the male-coded activities can become a self-fulfilling prophecy: You succeed in attracting women (and men) who think weaponizing autism into producing good animal suffering metrics is a waste of time, and soon “Effective Altruists” stop thinking animal suffering metrics are worth funding. That sounds pretty bad to me.
(2) …Thus writing off the idea of being more inclusive to [wo]men seems needlessly dismissive and reductive and leaves a lot of impact and opportunity on the table.
I certainly didn’t write off the idea of being more inclusive. There are obviously more ways to reduce the incidence of sexual harassment besides modifying the gender ratios of an org. But if gender ratios were a significant part of why the person I replied to saw more sexual harassment that would be discouraging for all of the reasons I have outlined thus far.
(3) If you care about achieving impact on existential risk, malaria, and even the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, it would be very helpful to have a healthy, robust, and impactful community to work on these problems. Being more inclusive to non-men would improve EA on all three of these axes and thus paying attention to at least some claims currently referred to as “woke” or “leftist” would improve on all three axes.
I agree with this (what Peter said) and also have a couple stuff to add:
Just so you know, in the Philippines, generally women are considered more charitable, and this somewhat manifests in EA Philippines, where we are mostly women. This might not account for the quality of who is more likely to “quantify charity” but definitely gender is not binary, and I think it’s limiting to say “men more likely; that’s why this community is made up like this.”
Maybe what you say is because there are more men in the movement, but I don’t think it’s simply because men “quantify charity more;” I think that statement is very limiting. There are a ton of factors as to why predominantly white men are those who are into EA, and I think even just the idea that they generally can afford to be philanthropic is one of them (not that this is negative since it’s good they help and presumably wanna help effectively).
I think saying sexual harrassment doesn’t matter if there XYZ other stuff happening might be in utilitarian cases kinda true, but this belief gives leeway to damaging the movement longer-term. Let’s say 1000 years from now we theoretically obliterated x-risk but knowingly or unknowingly allowed sexual harrassment to occur in the manner stated in the article… I think we can do better than that.
And I don’t think it’s right to sacrifice good values and good community dynamics if we’re fighting for a future where this community exists; I’d be very sad to see lots of discrimination/harassment continue to occur 5000 years from now.
Agreed… I think similar stuff happen in many communities and social groups, and I think maybe EA gets tricky ’cause it’s like, hey, aren’t we generally good people? So shouldn’t we like… be outliers and like… be people who are sensitive and stuff and by a given, never sexually harrass? So not that it’s any less important, but EA ends up sticking out because of that.
To me, EAs being nice is usually the case, as per the usual impression of non-EAs who see EA conferences (“wow, this was the nicest crowd I’ve ever seen!) but we are not infallible, and should never justify bad behavior and keep improving especially given who we are (i.e., EAs; like what you said, “is EA as good as it could be”). And I think we should keep assessing how norms/spaces enable/allow upsetting behavior like those in the article to happen
EA should not be aiming for a passing grade when it comes to sexual harassment. The question is not “is EA better than average”, but “is EA as good as it could be”.
My intuition would be that a community of altruists that care so deeply about the suffering of all beings should be much much better than average when it comes to sexual assault/sexual harassment both in terms of prevalence and handling of incidents?
Which means that even if we find we are average, it is shocking because it suggests that there are certain aspects of this community’s culture that are negative enough to drag us back to being average from much much better?
I have been saddened to learn of similarly bad behaviour in other communities I have been involved in. However it’s important not to let the commonness of abuse and harassment in broader society as an excuse not to improve. (I’m 100% not accusing you of this by the way, it’s just a behavior I’ve seen in other places).
EA should not be aiming for a passing grade when it comes to sexual harassment. The question is not “is EA better than average”, but “is EA as good as it could be”. And the answer to that question is no. I deeply hope that the concerns of the women in the article will be listened to.
I agree that EA should aim to be as good as it could be, but comparisons to other communities are still helpful. If the EA community is worse than others at this kind of thing then maybe:
Someone considering joining should seek out other communities of people trying to do good. (Ex: animal-focused work in EA spaces vs the broader animal advocacy world.)
We should start an unaffiliated group (“Impact Maximizers”) that tries to avoid these problems. (Somewhat like the “Atheism Plus” split.)
We should be figuring what we’re doing differently from most other communities and do more normal things instead. (Ex: this post)
[EDIT: this also feeds into how ashamed people should feel about their association with EA given what’s described here.]
I am pretty certain it wasn’t intended that way but:
Set off minor alarm bells when reading it, more so than the other bullet points, so I tried to put some thought into why that is (and why I didn’t get the same alarm bells for the other two points).
I think it’s because it (most likely inadvertently) implies “If people already in the movement do not like these power dynamics (around making women feel uncomfortable, up to sexual harrassment etc) then they should leave and start their own movement.”(I am aware this asks for some people, not necessarily women/the specific person concerned by this, to start the group, but this still does not address the potentially lower resources, career and networking opportunities). This can almost be used as an excuse not to fix things, as if people don’t like it they can leave. But, leaving means potentially sacrificing close relationships and career and funding opportunities, at least to some degree. Taken together, this could be taken to mean:
If you are a woman uncomfortable about the current norms on dealing with sexual harrassment, consider leaving/starting your own movement, taking potential career and funding hits to do so.
I fully don’t think you intended this, but please take this as my attempt to put words to why this set off minor alarm bells on first reading, and I would be interested to hear the thoughts of others. (It is also possible that that bullet point was in response to a previous comment, which I may not have read in enough depth).
The first and third bullet point do not have this same issue, as the first one does not explicitly reduce existing opportunities for people (i.e. someone considering joining EA does not have as much if anything already invested in it, although may reduce future opportunities if they would benefit a lot from getting more involved in EA), and the third bullet point speaks about making improvements.
I think you’re just playing in to a broader cultural problem here. Too many younger EAs are too invested in getting a job at an EA organization, and/or in having the movement as a part of their identity (as distinct from the underlying ideal). If you think the movement has serious flaws that make it not a good means for doing the most good, then you should not be trying to work for an EA org in the first place, and the access to those opportunities is irrelevant.
People should not be using the movement for career advancement independent of the goal of doing the most good they can do with their careers (and in most cases, can’t do that even if they intend to, because EA org jobs that are high-status within the movement are not similarly high-status outside of it).
I find the EA movement a useful source of ideas and a useful place to find potential collaborators for some of my projects, but I have no interest in working for an EA org because that’s not where I expect I’d have the biggest impact. I think the movement as a whole would be more successful, and a lot of younger EAs would be a lot happier, if they approached the movement with this level of detachment.
I believe you are conflating several things here. But first, a little tip on phrasing responses: putting the word ‘just’ in front of a critical response makes it more dismissive than you might have intended.
Agreed to that as stated, but I think this is a straw man. Things can both be bad in some ways, and better than some other options, but that doesn’t mean any flaws should be dismissed. This could even go to the extreme of (hypothetically) ‘I know I can have the highest impact if I work here, so I will bear the inappropriate attention of my colleagues/will leave and not have the highest impact I can’.
Some people may think that working at an EA org is the highest impact thing they could be doing (even if just for the short term), and career paths are very dependent on the individual. EA basically brands itself as the way to do the most good, so it should not be surprising if people hold this view. I was writing up my first comment it was with the broad assumption of ‘connections/opportunities within EA = connections/opportunities that help you do the most good’ (given the EA forum audience), not as a judgement of ‘EA is the only way of having a high impact’ (which is a different conversation).
I also have thoughts on this one, but this again is a different conversation. EA is not the only way to have a very high impact, but this should not be used as an excuse for avoiding improvements.
Hmm, yes, that’s not what I was trying to say. Edited to change “Some EAs” to “We”, to make it clearer that this is not addressed specifically to people who have experienced harassment.
I think this is probably not true: there are probably people considering joining EA who would find EA a much easier place to get funding than their other best opportunities for trying to do the kind of good they think most needs doing.
(Overall, what I was trying to communicate with my comment is that how EA compares to other communities is something that would be relevant to decisions many people might be making.)
Thanks for your response!
I don’t think changing “some EAs” to “we” necessarily changes my point of ‘people concerned should not have to move to a different community which may have fewer resources/opportunities’, independent of who actually creates that different community.
Note that my bigger point overall was why the second bullet point set off alarm bells, rather than specific points on the others (mostly included as a reference, and less thought put into the wording). That said:
I agree with this. I added “although may reduce future opportunities if they would benefit a lot from getting more involved in EA” after “i.e. someone considering joining EA does not have as much if anything already invested in it” a couple of minutes after originally posting my comment to reflect a very similar sentiment (however likely after you had already seen and started writing your response).
However, there is very much a difference between losing something that you have, and not gaining something that you could potentially have. When talking about personal cost, one is significantly higher than the other (agreed that both are bad), as is the toll of potentially broken trust and losing close relationships. It could potentially also have an impact cost ignoring social factors,e.g. if people have built up career/social capital that is very useful within EA, but not ranked as highly outside of EA/is not linked with the relevant people outside of EA, rather e.g. than building up non-EA networks.
That bullet point is also written as ‘someone considering joining’ rather than ‘we should’. ‘Someone considering joining’ may or may not join for a variety of reasons, and is a potential consequence to the community but not an action point. It is the action points/how action is approached that seem more relevant here.
To be clear, I’m very much in favor of efforts to make EA better here. I think the CEA Community Health Team’s (disclosure: my wife is on that team) work is important, that many EAs need to be more aware of how power dynamics impact relationships (disclosure again), and that fixing this should not primarily fall on the people impacted.
That’s right, sorry!
I also think the second bullet point is probably not a good idea even if we did know that EA has higher rates of this sort of issues than you’d expect: Atheism Plus didn’t go very well! I’m not saying that any of the three points are things that would definitely be worth doing in that world, but they’re an illustration about how the information of whether EA does have higher rates would be relevant to decisions people might make.
That’s good to hear re in favour of efforts to make EA better (edited for clarity). Thanks for your engagement on this.
Agreed with the necessity for awareness around power dynamics with the nuance of fixing this not having to fall on the people impacted by it. I found it good to see that post when it came out as it points out things people may not have been aware of.
I strongly agree here. As far as I know (but I have limited experience), EA does better than all other social movements I have been a part of (animal advocacy, new atheism) on the question of sexual harassment. But I still think we have much room to improve—we should.
Funnily enough, I think EA does worse than other communities / movements I’m involved with (grassroots animal advocacy & environmentalism). My partner and other friends (women) have often complained about various sexist issues when attending EA events e.g. men talking over them, borderline aggressive physical closeness, dismissing their ideas, etc., to the point that they doesn’t want to engage with the community. Experiences like this rarely, if ever, happen in other communities we hang out in. I think there are a few reasons for why EA has been worse than other communities in my cases:
I think our experiences differ on animal issues as when groups /movements professionalise, as has been happening over the past decade for animal welfare, the likelihood that men will abuse their positions of power increases dramatically. At the more grassroots level, power imbalances often aren’t stark enough to lead the types of issues that came out in the animal movement a few years back. EA has also been undergoing this professionalisation and consolidation of power, and seems like the article above highlights the negative consequences of that.
As has been noted many times, EA is currently about 70% male, whilst environmentalism/animal advocacy is majority women. I would be fairly confident that a more balanced gender ratio would mean less misogyny towards women.
Some EAs have a kind of “anti-woke” sentiment to the point where I actually think it could be fairly damaging e.g. it causes people to think issues related to race, gender, nationality etc aren’t important at all. I think it would be pretty valuable if everyone read a few core texts on things like racism, sexism, ableism, etc. to actually understand the every-day experiences of people facing various forms of discrimination and bigotry.
Pointing out the %70 male number seems very relevant since issues like this may contribute to that number and will likely push other women (such as myself) away from the movement.
While I haven’t experienced men in EA being dismissive of my ideas (though that’s only my personal experience in a very small EA community) I have found that the people I have met in EA are much more open to talking about sex and sexual experiences than I am comfortable with in a professional environment. I have personally had a colleague in EA ask me to go to a sex party to try BDSM sex toys. This was very strange for me. I have worked as a teacher, as a health care professional, and have spent a lot of time in academic settings, and I have never had an experience like that elsewhere. I also felt that it was being asked because they were sussing out whether or not I was part of the “cool crowd” who was open about my sex life and willing to be experimental.
I found this especially strange because there seem to be a lot of norms around conversation in EA (the same person who asked me to go to that party has strong feelings about up-keeping these norms) but they for some reason don’t have norms around speaking about sexual relationships, which is taboo in every other professional setting I have been a part of. I think having stronger “norms” or whatever you want to call it, or making discussions like this more taboo in EA, would be a good start. This will make it less likely that people in EA will feel comfortable doing the things discussed in this article.
I would guess this is a mixture of
Founder effects: Sexuality being a topic of discussion in communities which were precursors to EA. EA didn’t originate as a professional community.
Openness to weird ideas: The idea that buying a $40K car instead of a $30K car means you gave up an opportunity to save a life is pretty weird. The idea that vast numbers of people could exist in the future and our overwhelming moral priority should be to ensure that they’re living happy lives is pretty weird. The idea that shrimp welfare is super important is pretty weird. These are all intense, extraordinary conversation topics. Polls show most people masturbate. Most of us don’t talk about it. But if anyone talks about it, I imagine it’s a person who is comfortable with (or even delights in) intense, extraordinary conversations more generally.
fwiw, I haven’t personally experienced this much in EA; my guess is that individual variation in local groups explains more of the difference than any EA-wide thing.
EA may not have originated as a professional community, but it is one now. And that means raising the standards and changing the norms to exclude behavior such as the ones described above.
Agreed.
Didn’t EA originate as a professional community though specifically in the context of finding effective charities and 80k?
I have a hard time picturing an early EA community that isn’t professionally focused. Though maybe I didn’t get into EA early enough to know.
Strongly agree with your second point regarding openness to weird ideas.
Not in the Bay Area. Polyamory was a big discussion topic on LessWrong as far back as 2011: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/kLR5H4pbaBjzZxLv6/polyhacking
Thanks for sharing your experience and that of your partner. I agree that experiences here can differ dramatically. And I admit I in particular have very limited experience with discrimination by nature of being a white man in a position of power in my community.
I definitely have seen men talking over women and dismissing their ideas within EA and this does bother me and I do try to point it out when I see it (e.g, “Hey I think Sarah wanted to make a point here”).
I do personally think a more balanced gender ratio would be helpful for improving EA culture and would love to do what I can to recruit and retain women into EA.
While I do agree that “woke” and “cancel culture” can have some excesses, I am incredibly disappointed to see these excesses used to dismiss any possibility of a legitimate point about a particular axis of race/gender/nationality/language/etc. disparities, and I currently see this as the bigger problem in EA right now.
While I think these behaviours are antisocial, it seems preemptive to label them as sexist without looking at whether they’re unique to women. As a man, I’ve had many men and some (though a smaller proportion of) women talk over me or dismiss my ideas. I consider it jerkish behaviour—and quite possibly more common among EAs than the population at large—and I try to discourage it when I see it done to others (I usually don’t it mind too much in a 1-on-1) but it doesn’t seem obviously mysogynistic.
(Borderline aggressive physical closeness sounds more likely to be gender specific)
I’m not super familiar with the idea, but I think the idea here is that many people (unconsciously or otherwise) think that women are easier to interrupt, dismiss, or talk over. It’s the bias that’s sexist, not the act itself.
You could make that claim, but then it should be evidenced. Personally I have noticed my tendency (which I try to suppress!) is more readily to interrupt/dismiss people who are shorter than me, which seems to accord with the data.
I think the evidence is there to the same extent as your height evidence:
It also matches my personal experience.
I think there’s a natural reason to feel defensive when faced with this since it carries the label “sexist” which kinda takes a wide range of badness of behavior under one label, but I think this is frequently an unconscious bias people have so I don’t mean it to suggest you or others are bad people, but just that we can do better.
That evidence wouldn’t explain why (or show that) EAs would be more sexist. The behaviour James Ozden describes sounds consistent with, for example, EA containing a higher proportion of aspy types who, generally lacking some awareness of social norms, are more inclined to talk over everyone.
You seem to be really hung up on the term “sexist” and I think I get that. I think it’s very clear there is unintentional and unconscious sexism in the EA movement, like there is everywhere else. I’m not calling anyone bad. But I am going to throw a “Isolated Demand For Rigor, Five Yard Penalty” at your argument here.
Of course there’s sexism (unconscious and otherwise) in the EA movement.
But with the very strong caveat that I believe citing logical fallacies can lead to nothing more productive than arguments over whether the fallacy was correctly cited, I submit that this whole thread is a discussion about whether sexism is more than averagely prevalent in EA (for healthy reference classes), and, therefore whether EAs should put more resources into the problem.
In that context, I would argue the latter is the isolated demand for rigour, for which I’m making an in-context demand for justification.
[ETA: for the record I weakly agree that we should put more resources into the problem. I just don’t want us to sabotage our epistemics while making that determination]
I’m sorry I’m very confused what we are supposed to be discussing. I thought earlier you were arguing that there’s no sexism in EA because people who are interrupting women could just be interrupting people with lower height or just interrupting everyone equally. I was arguing against that.
I’m personally not saying “EA is more sexist than relevant reference classes”. I don’t think I believe that, or it would depend a lot on the reference class… and there appears to be notable within-EA variation.
I probably am saying “we should put more resources into figuring out sexism in EA”, but that’s not what I thought we were talking about, and of course I’d want to think a lot more about what that’s supposed to look like, what “more” means, what “resources” means, what “figuring out sexism” means, etc.
I certainly didn’t mean to claim that. I’ve known of multiple examples of sexism in EA. I think the comment to which I originally replied might not have been another such example, and wanted to guard against assuming it was.
Lol, and now I’m wondering how much I do of that as someone over six foot/ 185cm
I don’t think the 70⁄30 gender ratio causes misogyny. I think it amplifies experiences of it among women because they are the minority here. Imagine a group of 100 EAs, 70 men and 30 women, and a group of 100 environmentalists, 30 men and 70 women. Suppose 10% of all men do something misogynistic towards a random woman in their group. Then 23% of EA women experience misogyny compared to only 4% of environmentalist women, even though each individual man in each group is equally likely to have behaved misogynistically.
(Prior to seeing this post, I’d have conjectured that men in EA are less likely than men elsewhere to behave misogynistically, and maybe that’s still true, but these reports are really alarming.)
This idea has been called the Petrie multiplier. I agree that this probably makes things worse for women in EA.
If instead you model it as X% of all men do something misogynistic toward women they encounter instead of as toward a random woman in the group you end up with something much less skewed.
I think that both modeling choices would make sense depending on which specific type of misogyny is the concern. For example, interruptions would seem likely to fit your model better, while asking a woman out in an inappropriate manner might be fit by the random group member model better.
Although I think that the group size is realistically going to be smaller than 100 in almost all cases, often far smaller, which would also lead to less skew.
Edit: although if instead of considering how many women experience >0 instances of (significant) misogyny, and instead consider how much misogyny on average each woman experiences, then it would go back to being heavily skewed by the proportion of genders in each group.
Ozden comment contains great (but predictable) points.
He also packs in his self-interested argument, into this extremely important/sensitive heated discussion:
Don’t have a lot of time to explain, but this isn’t true, it’s almost the opposite.
The power structures in distributed movements exist and are controlled in different ways, sometimes producing pretty bad behavior but with more dubious leadership/management.
DxE, for example, had an almost existential problem with sexual misconduct/abuse. This was probably connected to second-tier leaders and the distributed, chapter-like system, as opposed to Wayne actively courting it.
When I spoke to Wayne (and the subsequent leadership), they pointed to reforms such as central sexual harassment policies and enforcing a better culture. While I don’t know how substantive these reforms were, something like this would be probably involved in a true solution. Being “top down” helps a lot, as well as having a professionalized staff/leadership to execute this.
Don’t have time to put in an essay, but there’s a much longer thread here about distributed movement and power, and also a separate thread here about sexual harassment and animal advocacy. On the latter point, we got multiple layers of a nightmarish “motte and bailey” that is ongoing—we’re approaching the point of non-viability in attaching EA to us.
Incredibly, these articles aren’t in the top 5 things I would need to communicate to EAs right now.
On the plus side, Ozden’s comment did produce a great thread by Lauren Maria, who is a thoughtful and brilliant leader.
Just wanted to point out that Peter and you seem to mention two different classes of behaviors. While the behaviors you mention certainly create a more unwelcoming environment to women and shouldn’t be welcome in EA environmens, I don’t think they would meet the (legal ?) definition of sexual harassment and may not be the types of actions Peter had in mind.
My guess is that EA is currently male because aggressively quantifying and measuring charitable giving is an activity that appeals primarily to men. As long as that remains true, and Effective Altruism remains Effective Altruism in that way, my prediction is that the gender ratio will remain the same, just as most hobbies and social groups maintain similar gender ratios over time even when people work really hard to change them. If this form of harassment is inherent to male-dominated activities then that would be pretty sad.
I’m pretty sure the standard left-American take on everyday harrassment is straightforwardly compatible with believing it’s not very important in a world with existential risk and malaria and the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, and that this is a sensible position for EAs to hold even when they’re not explicitly “anti-woke”.
I strong disagreed (but did not downvote) this comment for a few reasons:
(1) I don’t think there’s any evidence that EA is an inherently and immutably male activity, and we shouldn’t assume such. EA is currently male-skewed, yes, but I was involved in a college “venture philanthropy” group that involved explicit rankings of non-profit organizations (quite similar to EA in many ways) and it was female-skewed, and I’ve observed this in my broader experiences with venture philanthropy (though don’t have statistics to confirm). There’s a lot of ways EA can end up male-skewed (or venture philanthropy can end up female-skewed) without it being an inherently and immutably male or an inherently and immutably female activity.
(2) Even if EA is an inherently and immutably male-leaning activity in general (which I don’t necessarily agree with per above), there’s a lot of value in finding ways to involve the remaining ~50% of the population, so surely we’d want to find ways to make it less male-leaning on the margin. Thus writing off the idea of being more inclusive to men seems needlessly dismissive and reductive and leaves a lot of impact and opportunity on the table.
(3) If you care about achieving impact on existential risk, malaria, and even the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, it would be very helpful to have a healthy, robust, and impactful community to work on these problems. Being more inclusive to non-men would improve EA on all three of these axes and thus paying attention to at least some claims currently referred to as “woke” or “leftist” would improve on all three axes. (To be clear, I don’t consider myself “leftist” but I still take many of these kinds of concern very seriously.)
There’s at least some evidence, in that it’s a tradition that is currently mostly participated in by men. I don’t know exactly what you mean by “inherently” or what brand of evidence you’re looking for, but it’s not really relevant to the discussion that the cause for the difference in interest be biological or social or whatever. These sorts of gender ratios seem hard to “correct” when it comes to C.S. departments and Magic the Gathering tournaments, and my guess is that with EA it will be similar. If someone wants to prove me wrong then I’d welcome the attempt.
Well, that depends, doesn’t it? If “making EA less male-leaning on the margin” means coming up with fewer WELLBYs, then plausibly “making EA less male” means making EA less able to accomplish its goals.
Often what I’ve seen academic departments do to attract women into STEM is to exaggerate the interpersonal aspects of a given profession and downplay the nerdy stuff. This ends up being only moderately harmful because the women take the intro classes, decide they’re not interested for reasons completely divorced from social expectations, and then choose something different. But when it comes to a charitable organization, downplaying the male-coded activities can become a self-fulfilling prophecy: You succeed in attracting women (and men) who think weaponizing autism into producing good animal suffering metrics is a waste of time, and soon “Effective Altruists” stop thinking animal suffering metrics are worth funding. That sounds pretty bad to me.
I certainly didn’t write off the idea of being more inclusive. There are obviously more ways to reduce the incidence of sexual harassment besides modifying the gender ratios of an org. But if gender ratios were a significant part of why the person I replied to saw more sexual harassment that would be discouraging for all of the reasons I have outlined thus far.
Again I agree.
I agree with this (what Peter said) and also have a couple stuff to add:
Just so you know, in the Philippines, generally women are considered more charitable, and this somewhat manifests in EA Philippines, where we are mostly women. This might not account for the quality of who is more likely to “quantify charity” but definitely gender is not binary, and I think it’s limiting to say “men more likely; that’s why this community is made up like this.”
Maybe what you say is because there are more men in the movement, but I don’t think it’s simply because men “quantify charity more;” I think that statement is very limiting. There are a ton of factors as to why predominantly white men are those who are into EA, and I think even just the idea that they generally can afford to be philanthropic is one of them (not that this is negative since it’s good they help and presumably wanna help effectively).
I think saying sexual harrassment doesn’t matter if there XYZ other stuff happening might be in utilitarian cases kinda true, but this belief gives leeway to damaging the movement longer-term. Let’s say 1000 years from now we theoretically obliterated x-risk but knowingly or unknowingly allowed sexual harrassment to occur in the manner stated in the article… I think we can do better than that. And I don’t think it’s right to sacrifice good values and good community dynamics if we’re fighting for a future where this community exists; I’d be very sad to see lots of discrimination/harassment continue to occur 5000 years from now.
I agree wholeheartedly with the two comments above.
Agreed… I think similar stuff happen in many communities and social groups, and I think maybe EA gets tricky ’cause it’s like, hey, aren’t we generally good people? So shouldn’t we like… be outliers and like… be people who are sensitive and stuff and by a given, never sexually harrass? So not that it’s any less important, but EA ends up sticking out because of that.
To me, EAs being nice is usually the case, as per the usual impression of non-EAs who see EA conferences (“wow, this was the nicest crowd I’ve ever seen!) but we are not infallible, and should never justify bad behavior and keep improving especially given who we are (i.e., EAs; like what you said, “is EA as good as it could be”). And I think we should keep assessing how norms/spaces enable/allow upsetting behavior like those in the article to happen
My intuition would be that a community of altruists that care so deeply about the suffering of all beings should be much much better than average when it comes to sexual assault/sexual harassment both in terms of prevalence and handling of incidents?
Which means that even if we find we are average, it is shocking because it suggests that there are certain aspects of this community’s culture that are negative enough to drag us back to being average from much much better?