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.
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.
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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:
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.