Readers may be interested to compare the EA Survey data with the data that CEA has collected from event registrations over the past 1.5 years. This slide deck contains charts showing the following categories:
Gender
Race/ethnicity
Age
Career stage
Which year attendees got engaged with EA
Do attendees feel part of the EA community
A few items to highlight:
The percentage of female and non-binary attendees ranged from 32% to 40%
The percentage of non-white attendees ranged from 27% to 49%
The percentage of attendees aged 18-35 ranged from 83-96%
46% of survey respondents at EA Global: Reconnect had not engaged seriously with EA before 2018
Thanks Barry. I agree it’s interesting to make the comparison!
Do you know if these numbers (for attendees) differ from the numbers for applicants? I don’t know if any of these events were selective to any degree (as EA Global is), but if so, I’d expect the figures for applicants to be a closer match to those of the EA Survey (and the community as a whole), even if you weren’t explicitly filtering with promoting diversity in mind. I suppose there could also be other causes of this, in addition to self-selection, such as efforts you might have made to reach a diverse audience when promoting the events?
One thing I noted is that the attendees for these events appear to be even younger and more student-heavy than the EA Survey sample (of course, at least one of the events seems to have been specifically for students). This might explain the differences between your figures and those of the EA Survey. In EA Survey data, based on a quick look, student respondents appear to be slightly more female and slighly less white than non-students.
To add to Barry’s point, WANBAM has interfaced with over 500 people in the first two years of our operations, so a smaller pool than this survey (more here). Our demographics (setting aside gender of course) are quite different from the EA Survey findings. 40% of our recent round of mentees (120 people in total this round) are people of color. There is also significant geographic diversity with this round of mentees coming from the US, UK, Australia, Germany, Philippines, France, Singapore, Canada, Switzerland, Belgium, Norway, Netherlands, Spain, Brasil, Denmark Mexico, India, Hong Kong, New Zealand, Ghana, Czech Republic, Finland, and Sweden.
Mentees most frequently selected interest in emerging technologies (67%), Research (59%), Public Policy, and Politics (56%), International development (49%), Cause prioritization (49%), Community Building (43%), High impact philanthropy (41%), mental health and wellbeing (40%), Philanthropic education and outreach (33%), Operations (33%), Animal advocacy (30%), Women in technology (29%), and Earning to Give (20%).
I suspect there are subtle dynamics at play here around who is completing the survey. What’s your phrasing on the external communications around who you want to take it? Do you specify a threshold of involvement in EA? Happy to put our heads together here. Thanks! Warmly, Kathryn
Your comment makes it sound like you think there’s some mystery to resolve here or that the composition of people who engaged with WANBAM conflicts with the EA Survey data. But it’s hard for me to see how that would be the case. Is there any reason to think that the composition of people who choose to interact with WANBAM (or who get mentored by WANBAM) would be representative of the broader EA community as a whole?
WANBAM is prominently marketed as “a global network of women, trans people of any gender, and non-binary people” and explicitly has DEI as part of its mission. It seems like we would strongly expect the composition of people who choose to engage with WANBAM to be more “diverse” than the community as a whole. I don’t think we should be surprised that the composition of people who interact with WANBAM differs from the composition of the wider community as a whole any more than we should be surprised that a ‘LessWrongers in EA’ group, or some such, differed from the composition of the broader community. Maybe an even closer analogy would be whether we should be surprised that a Diversity and Inclusion focused meetup at EAG has a more diverse set of attendees than the broader EA Global audience.
Also, it seems a little odd to even ask, but does WANBAM take any efforts to try to reach a more diverse audience in terms of race/ethnicity or geography or ensure that the people you mentor are a diverse group? If so, then it also seems clear that we’d expect WANBAM to have higher numbers from the groups you are deliberately trying to reach more of.
It’s possible I’m missing something, but given all this, I don’t see why we’d expect the people who WANBAM elect to mentor to be representative of the wider EA community (indeed, WANBAM explicitly focuses only on a minority of the EA community), so I don’t see these results as having too much relevance to estimating the composition of the community as a whole.
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Regarding external communications for the EA Survey. The EA Survey is promoted by a bunch of different outlets, including people just sharing it with their friends, and it goes without saying we don’t directly control all of these messages. Still, the EA Survey itself isn’t presented with any engagement requirement and the major ‘promoters’ make an effort to make clear that we encourage anyone with any level of involvement or affiliation with EA to take the survey. Here’s a representative example from the EA Newsletter, which has been the major referrer in recent years:
If you think of yourself, however loosely, as an “effective altruist,” please consider taking the survey — even if you’re very new to EA! Every response helps us get a clearer picture.
Another thing we can do is compare the composition of people who took the EA Survey from the different referrers. It would be surprising if the referrers to the EA Survey, with their different messages, all happened to employ external communications that artificially reduce the apparent ethnic diversity of the EA community. In fact, all the figures for % not-only-white across the referrers are much lower than the 40% figure for WANBAM mentees, ranging between 17-28% (roughly in line with the sample as a whole). There was one exception, which was an email sent to local group organizers, which was 36% not-only-white. That outlier is not surprising to me since, as we observed in the EA Groups Survey, group organizers are much less white than the community as a whole (47% white). This makes sense, simply because there are a lot of groups run in majority non-white countries, meaning there are a lot of non-white organizers from these groups, even though the global community (heavily dominated by majority white countries) is majority white.
The EA Global events had a higher bar for entry in terms of understanding and involvement in EA, but we don’t make admissions decisions based on demographic quotas. The demographics of attendees and applicants are broadly similar. I did some analysis of this for EAG Virtual and EAGxVirtual last year. You can see the charts for gender and ethnicity here.
EA conferences tend to be more attractive to people who are newer to the movement, thinking through their career plans, and wanting to meet like-minded people. Our data supports your findings that newer members are more diverse. I expect the EA Survey receives more responses from people who have been involved in EA for a longer time. That’s my guess as to the main reason for the differences.
Interestingly, EAG attendees don’t seem straightforwardly newer to EA than EAS respondents. I would agree that it’s likely explained by things like age/student status and more generally which groups are more likely to be interested in this kind of event.
Readers may be interested to compare the EA Survey data with the data that CEA has collected from event registrations over the past 1.5 years. This slide deck contains charts showing the following categories:
Gender
Race/ethnicity
Age
Career stage
Which year attendees got engaged with EA
Do attendees feel part of the EA community
A few items to highlight:
The percentage of female and non-binary attendees ranged from 32% to 40%
The percentage of non-white attendees ranged from 27% to 49%
The percentage of attendees aged 18-35 ranged from 83-96%
46% of survey respondents at EA Global: Reconnect had not engaged seriously with EA before 2018
Thanks Barry. I agree it’s interesting to make the comparison!
Do you know if these numbers (for attendees) differ from the numbers for applicants? I don’t know if any of these events were selective to any degree (as EA Global is), but if so, I’d expect the figures for applicants to be a closer match to those of the EA Survey (and the community as a whole), even if you weren’t explicitly filtering with promoting diversity in mind. I suppose there could also be other causes of this, in addition to self-selection, such as efforts you might have made to reach a diverse audience when promoting the events?
One thing I noted is that the attendees for these events appear to be even younger and more student-heavy than the EA Survey sample (of course, at least one of the events seems to have been specifically for students). This might explain the differences between your figures and those of the EA Survey. In EA Survey data, based on a quick look, student respondents appear to be slightly more female and slighly less white than non-students.
To add to Barry’s point, WANBAM has interfaced with over 500 people in the first two years of our operations, so a smaller pool than this survey (more here). Our demographics (setting aside gender of course) are quite different from the EA Survey findings. 40% of our recent round of mentees (120 people in total this round) are people of color. There is also significant geographic diversity with this round of mentees coming from the US, UK, Australia, Germany, Philippines, France, Singapore, Canada, Switzerland, Belgium, Norway, Netherlands, Spain, Brasil, Denmark Mexico, India, Hong Kong, New Zealand, Ghana, Czech Republic, Finland, and Sweden.
Mentees most frequently selected interest in emerging technologies (67%), Research (59%), Public Policy, and Politics (56%), International development (49%), Cause prioritization (49%), Community Building (43%), High impact philanthropy (41%), mental health and wellbeing (40%), Philanthropic education and outreach (33%), Operations (33%), Animal advocacy (30%), Women in technology (29%), and Earning to Give (20%).
I suspect there are subtle dynamics at play here around who is completing the survey. What’s your phrasing on the external communications around who you want to take it? Do you specify a threshold of involvement in EA? Happy to put our heads together here. Thanks! Warmly, Kathryn
Thanks for your comment Kathryn!
Your comment makes it sound like you think there’s some mystery to resolve here or that the composition of people who engaged with WANBAM conflicts with the EA Survey data. But it’s hard for me to see how that would be the case. Is there any reason to think that the composition of people who choose to interact with WANBAM (or who get mentored by WANBAM) would be representative of the broader EA community as a whole?
WANBAM is prominently marketed as “a global network of women, trans people of any gender, and non-binary people” and explicitly has DEI as part of its mission. It seems like we would strongly expect the composition of people who choose to engage with WANBAM to be more “diverse” than the community as a whole. I don’t think we should be surprised that the composition of people who interact with WANBAM differs from the composition of the wider community as a whole any more than we should be surprised that a ‘LessWrongers in EA’ group, or some such, differed from the composition of the broader community. Maybe an even closer analogy would be whether we should be surprised that a Diversity and Inclusion focused meetup at EAG has a more diverse set of attendees than the broader EA Global audience.
Also, it seems a little odd to even ask, but does WANBAM take any efforts to try to reach a more diverse audience in terms of race/ethnicity or geography or ensure that the people you mentor are a diverse group? If so, then it also seems clear that we’d expect WANBAM to have higher numbers from the groups you are deliberately trying to reach more of.
It’s possible I’m missing something, but given all this, I don’t see why we’d expect the people who WANBAM elect to mentor to be representative of the wider EA community (indeed, WANBAM explicitly focuses only on a minority of the EA community), so I don’t see these results as having too much relevance to estimating the composition of the community as a whole.
---
Regarding external communications for the EA Survey. The EA Survey is promoted by a bunch of different outlets, including people just sharing it with their friends, and it goes without saying we don’t directly control all of these messages. Still, the EA Survey itself isn’t presented with any engagement requirement and the major ‘promoters’ make an effort to make clear that we encourage anyone with any level of involvement or affiliation with EA to take the survey. Here’s a representative example from the EA Newsletter, which has been the major referrer in recent years:
Another thing we can do is compare the composition of people who took the EA Survey from the different referrers. It would be surprising if the referrers to the EA Survey, with their different messages, all happened to employ external communications that artificially reduce the apparent ethnic diversity of the EA community. In fact, all the figures for % not-only-white across the referrers are much lower than the 40% figure for WANBAM mentees, ranging between 17-28% (roughly in line with the sample as a whole). There was one exception, which was an email sent to local group organizers, which was 36% not-only-white. That outlier is not surprising to me since, as we observed in the EA Groups Survey, group organizers are much less white than the community as a whole (47% white). This makes sense, simply because there are a lot of groups run in majority non-white countries, meaning there are a lot of non-white organizers from these groups, even though the global community (heavily dominated by majority white countries) is majority white.
The EA Global events had a higher bar for entry in terms of understanding and involvement in EA, but we don’t make admissions decisions based on demographic quotas. The demographics of attendees and applicants are broadly similar. I did some analysis of this for EAG Virtual and EAGxVirtual last year. You can see the charts for gender and ethnicity here.
EA conferences tend to be more attractive to people who are newer to the movement, thinking through their career plans, and wanting to meet like-minded people. Our data supports your findings that newer members are more diverse. I expect the EA Survey receives more responses from people who have been involved in EA for a longer time. That’s my guess as to the main reason for the differences.
Thanks for the reply!
Interestingly, EAG attendees don’t seem straightforwardly newer to EA than EAS respondents. I would agree that it’s likely explained by things like age/student status and more generally which groups are more likely to be interested in this kind of event.