There’s a lot of discussion here about why things don’t get reported to the community health team, and what they’re responsible for, so I wanted to add my own bit of anecdata.
I’m a woman who has been closely involved with a particularly gender-imbalanced portion of EA for 7 years, who has personally experienced and secondhand heard about many issues around gender dynamics, and who has never reported anything to the community health team (despite several suggestions from friends to). Now I’m considering why.
Upon reflection, here are a few reasons:
Early on, some of it was naiveté. I experienced occasional inappropriate comments or situations from senior male researchers when I was a teenager, but assumed that they could never be interested in me because of the age and experience gap. At the time I thought that I must be misinterpreting the situation, and only see it the way I do now with the benefit of experience and hindsight. (I never felt unsafe, and if I had, would have reported it or left.)
Often, the behavior felt plausibly deniable. “Is this person asking me to meet at a coffeeshop to discuss research or to hit on me? How about meeting at a bar? Going for a walk on the beach?” I was unsure what crossed into inappropriate territory, and whether it was I who was problematically sexualizing everything. Most of this is only obvious in hindsight, and because I have enough experience to notice patterns in behavior across individuals. Moreover, most of these interactions were respectful, and grew to be a problem only because they happened so systematically—for a while, it felt like every senior researcher I tried to get project mentorship from tried to date me instead, then avoided me after I turned them down, which has had serious career consequences. I didn’t report this because it was unclear what to report—no particular individual was clearly acting inappropriately, and (at least the first few times) I doubted myself.
I moved to the bay a few years ago for a PhD, and access to collaborative workspace, networking events, and supplemental funding (very necessary for me, with health problems on an academic stipend) are all gated by a couple of people here. They are all men (as far as I know), one or more them have asked me out or shown romantic interest (respectfully), and there are few enough women in my field here that I didn’t feel I had any hope of remaining anonymous. I thought making a big fuss about these things would tank my career, or at least lose me the trust I need to access these spaces and resources, and I wasn’t willing to do that. I moved here and made a bunch of personal sacrifices to work on incredibly important problems, after all.
Over the past 7 years, my motivation has developed from mostly-1 to mostly-2 to mostly-3. Regardless, I honestly don’t know of anything that the community health team could do to help with any of this. There were no extreme situations that warranted a specific individual being banned. The problematic dynamics were subtle, and I didn’t see how any broad communication could help with them. I didn’t want the team to take any action that might de-anonymize me, for career reasons. I don’t see anything to blame the community health team for here.
In my personal experience a good deal of sexual assault/harassment etc. goes unreported (especially at universities) because especially if you personally know the perpetrator as a friend or romantic partner you often have pretty complicated feelings about escalating things.
I think making clear the default outcome of reporting is “you have a conversation with someone a good deal more experience than you about what steps tend to be taken in these cases and if they’ve heard anything else and you get agency around the result” rather than “you set in motion a process against this person you have a very hazy understanding of” helps a lot. (the health team’s policy around confidentiality seems good for this reason).
Thank you for sharing your experience here. I’m really sorry to hear about these gender dynamics and how it’s affected you personally, your motivation and your career.
Do you have any suggested actions you’d like to see to help prevent this being repeated?
(I imagine organisations having policies about appropriate professional conduct and actively working on DEI would help to some extent with these issues. But I’m not sure what specifically, how much it’d help, and if there’s other things that you implied that I missed.)
—
Also, on a separate note, my understanding is that the community health team would like to hear about general experiences like this (even if you don’t want to “report” anything/anyone specifically and want any action taken) as they often provide advice to organisations/groups/community spaces/write forum posts about ways of improving the health of the community more generally and hearing things like this would help to put good policies in place and spread ideas around appropriate conduct etc.
There’s a lot of discussion here about why things don’t get reported to the community health team, and what they’re responsible for, so I wanted to add my own bit of anecdata.
I’m a woman who has been closely involved with a particularly gender-imbalanced portion of EA for 7 years, who has personally experienced and secondhand heard about many issues around gender dynamics, and who has never reported anything to the community health team (despite several suggestions from friends to). Now I’m considering why.
Upon reflection, here are a few reasons:
Early on, some of it was naiveté. I experienced occasional inappropriate comments or situations from senior male researchers when I was a teenager, but assumed that they could never be interested in me because of the age and experience gap. At the time I thought that I must be misinterpreting the situation, and only see it the way I do now with the benefit of experience and hindsight. (I never felt unsafe, and if I had, would have reported it or left.)
Often, the behavior felt plausibly deniable. “Is this person asking me to meet at a coffeeshop to discuss research or to hit on me? How about meeting at a bar? Going for a walk on the beach?” I was unsure what crossed into inappropriate territory, and whether it was I who was problematically sexualizing everything. Most of this is only obvious in hindsight, and because I have enough experience to notice patterns in behavior across individuals. Moreover, most of these interactions were respectful, and grew to be a problem only because they happened so systematically—for a while, it felt like every senior researcher I tried to get project mentorship from tried to date me instead, then avoided me after I turned them down, which has had serious career consequences. I didn’t report this because it was unclear what to report—no particular individual was clearly acting inappropriately, and (at least the first few times) I doubted myself.
I moved to the bay a few years ago for a PhD, and access to collaborative workspace, networking events, and supplemental funding (very necessary for me, with health problems on an academic stipend) are all gated by a couple of people here. They are all men (as far as I know), one or more them have asked me out or shown romantic interest (respectfully), and there are few enough women in my field here that I didn’t feel I had any hope of remaining anonymous. I thought making a big fuss about these things would tank my career, or at least lose me the trust I need to access these spaces and resources, and I wasn’t willing to do that. I moved here and made a bunch of personal sacrifices to work on incredibly important problems, after all.
Over the past 7 years, my motivation has developed from mostly-1 to mostly-2 to mostly-3. Regardless, I honestly don’t know of anything that the community health team could do to help with any of this. There were no extreme situations that warranted a specific individual being banned. The problematic dynamics were subtle, and I didn’t see how any broad communication could help with them. I didn’t want the team to take any action that might de-anonymize me, for career reasons. I don’t see anything to blame the community health team for here.
In my personal experience a good deal of sexual assault/harassment etc. goes unreported (especially at universities) because especially if you personally know the perpetrator as a friend or romantic partner you often have pretty complicated feelings about escalating things.
I think making clear the default outcome of reporting is “you have a conversation with someone a good deal more experience than you about what steps tend to be taken in these cases and if they’ve heard anything else and you get agency around the result” rather than “you set in motion a process against this person you have a very hazy understanding of” helps a lot. (the health team’s policy around confidentiality seems good for this reason).
Thank you for sharing your experience here. I’m really sorry to hear about these gender dynamics and how it’s affected you personally, your motivation and your career.
Do you have any suggested actions you’d like to see to help prevent this being repeated?
(I imagine organisations having policies about appropriate professional conduct and actively working on DEI would help to some extent with these issues. But I’m not sure what specifically, how much it’d help, and if there’s other things that you implied that I missed.)
—
Also, on a separate note, my understanding is that the community health team would like to hear about general experiences like this (even if you don’t want to “report” anything/anyone specifically and want any action taken) as they often provide advice to organisations/groups/community spaces/write forum posts about ways of improving the health of the community more generally and hearing things like this would help to put good policies in place and spread ideas around appropriate conduct etc.