We observed extremely strong divergence across gender categories. 76.9% of responses from male participants identified as straight/heterosexual, while only 48.6% of female responses identified as such.
The majority of females don’t identify as heterosexual?
That’s not quite right because some responses were coded as “unclear”: around 33% of female responses were coded as not heterosexual, which is almost 3x as many for male respondents.
Both those percentages are still relatively high, of course. Unfortunately I don’t think it’s clear what to make of them, due to a number of factors: i) results for the general population surveys are inconsistent across different surveys, ii) results seem to vary a lot by age (for example, see here) and likely by other demographic factors (e.g. how liberal or educated the population is) which I would expect to raise EA numbers, iii) most surveys don’t use the question format that we were asked to use (people writing in an unguided self-description) making comparison difficult, iv) as a result of that survey choice the results for our survey are very hard to interpret with large percentages of responses being explicitly coded as unclassifiable.
As such, while interesting, I think these results are hard to make anything of with any degree of confidence, which is why we haven’t looked into them in any detail.
Thanks. Any particular reason why you decided to do unguided self-description?
You could include the regular options and an “other (please specify)” option too. That might give people choice, reduce time required for analysis, and make comparisons to general population surveys easier.
This was a specific question and question format that it was requested we include. I wouldn’t like to speculate about the rationale, but I discuss some of the pros and cons associated with each style of question in general here.
Younger people and more liberal people are much more likely to identify as not-straight, and EAs are generally young and liberal. I wonder how far this gets you to explaining this difference, which does need a lot of explaining since it’s so big. Some stats on this (in the US).
I would absolutely expect EAs to differ in various ways to the general population. The fact that a greater proportion of EAs are vegan is totally expected, and I can understand the computer science stat as well given how important AI is in EA at the moment.
However when it comes to sexuality it isn’t clear to me why the EA population should differ. It may not be very important to understand why, but then again the reason why could be quite interesting and help us understand what draws people to EA in the first place. For example perhaps LGBTQ+ people are more prone to activism/trying to improve the world because they find themselves to be discriminated against, and this means they are more open to EA. If so, this might indicate that outreach to existing activists might be high value. Of course this is complete conjecture and I’m not actually sure if it’s worth digging further (I asked the question mostly out of curiosity).
I agree that there’s not a direct explanation of why we would expect this difference in the EA community, unlike in the case of veganism and computer science.
I also agree that properties of our sampling itself don’t seem to offer good explanations of these results (although of course we can’t rule this out). This would just push the explanation back a level, and it seems even harder to explain why we’d heavily oversample nonheterosexual (and especially female nonheterosexual EAs compared to female heterosexual EAs) than to explain why we might observe these differences in the EA community.
That said, we do have good reason to think that the EA community (given its other characteristic) would have higher percentages of nonheterosexual responses. Elite colleges in general also have substantially higher rates than the general population (it looks like around 15% at Harvard and Yale) and of course the EA community contains a very disproportionate percentage of elite college graduates. Also, although we used slightly different questions, it seems like the EA community may be more liberal than elite colleges, and we might expected higher self-reported nonheterosexuality in more liberal populations (comparing to Harvard and Yale again, they have around 12% somewhat/very conservatives, we have around 3% centre right or right- we have more ‘libertarians’, but if these are mostly socially liberal then the same might apply).
As I noted before though, I think that this is probably just a result of the particular question format used. I would expect more nonheterosexual responses where people can write in a free response compared to where they have to select either heterosexual or some other fixed category.
Let’s presume that the ‘share non-straight is’ a robust empirical finding and not an artifact of sample selection or of how the question was asked, or of the nonresponse etc. (We could dig into this further if it merited the effort)...
It is indeed somewhat surprised, but I am not who surprised, as I expect a group that is very different in some ways from the general population may likely be very different in other ways, and we may not always have a clear story for why. If we did want to look into it further it further, we might look into what share of the vegan population, or of the ‘computer science population’, in this mainly very-young age group, is not straight-identified. (of course those numbers may also be very very difficult together, particularly because of the difficulty of getting a representative sample of small populations, as I discuss here.
This may be very interesting from a sociological point of view but I am not sure if it is a first order important for us right now. That said, if we have time we may be able to get back to it.
The majority of females don’t identify as heterosexual? Am I the only one who finds this super interesting? I mean in the UK around 2% of females in the wider population identify as LGB.
Even the male heterosexual figure is surprising low. Any sociologists or others want to chime in here?
That’s not quite right because some responses were coded as “unclear”: around 33% of female responses were coded as not heterosexual, which is almost 3x as many for male respondents.
Both those percentages are still relatively high, of course. Unfortunately I don’t think it’s clear what to make of them, due to a number of factors: i) results for the general population surveys are inconsistent across different surveys, ii) results seem to vary a lot by age (for example, see here) and likely by other demographic factors (e.g. how liberal or educated the population is) which I would expect to raise EA numbers, iii) most surveys don’t use the question format that we were asked to use (people writing in an unguided self-description) making comparison difficult, iv) as a result of that survey choice the results for our survey are very hard to interpret with large percentages of responses being explicitly coded as unclassifiable.
As such, while interesting, I think these results are hard to make anything of with any degree of confidence, which is why we haven’t looked into them in any detail.
Thanks. Any particular reason why you decided to do unguided self-description?
You could include the regular options and an “other (please specify)” option too. That might give people choice, reduce time required for analysis, and make comparisons to general population surveys easier.
This was a specific question and question format that it was requested we include. I wouldn’t like to speculate about the rationale, but I discuss some of the pros and cons associated with each style of question in general here.
I was surprised to see that this Gallup poll found no difference between college graduates and college nongraduates (in the US).
Younger people and more liberal people are much more likely to identify as not-straight, and EAs are generally young and liberal. I wonder how far this gets you to explaining this difference, which does need a lot of explaining since it’s so big. Some stats on this (in the US).
I was also surprised, but obviously we are far from a random sample of the population, there is a very unusual ‘selection’ process to
know about EA
identify with EA
take the survey
E.g., (and its not a completely fair analogy but) about 30% of 2019 respondents said they were vegan vs about vs about 1-3% of comparable populations
Perhaps better analogy: Looking quickly at the 2018-2019 data, roughly half of responded studied computer science. This compares to about 5% of the US degrees granted , 10% if we include all engineering degrees.
But is this worth pursuing further? Should we dig into surprising was the EA/EA-survey population differs from the general population?
I would absolutely expect EAs to differ in various ways to the general population. The fact that a greater proportion of EAs are vegan is totally expected, and I can understand the computer science stat as well given how important AI is in EA at the moment.
However when it comes to sexuality it isn’t clear to me why the EA population should differ. It may not be very important to understand why, but then again the reason why could be quite interesting and help us understand what draws people to EA in the first place. For example perhaps LGBTQ+ people are more prone to activism/trying to improve the world because they find themselves to be discriminated against, and this means they are more open to EA. If so, this might indicate that outreach to existing activists might be high value. Of course this is complete conjecture and I’m not actually sure if it’s worth digging further (I asked the question mostly out of curiosity).
I agree that there’s not a direct explanation of why we would expect this difference in the EA community, unlike in the case of veganism and computer science.
I also agree that properties of our sampling itself don’t seem to offer good explanations of these results (although of course we can’t rule this out). This would just push the explanation back a level, and it seems even harder to explain why we’d heavily oversample nonheterosexual (and especially female nonheterosexual EAs compared to female heterosexual EAs) than to explain why we might observe these differences in the EA community.
That said, we do have good reason to think that the EA community (given its other characteristic) would have higher percentages of nonheterosexual responses. Elite colleges in general also have substantially higher rates than the general population (it looks like around 15% at Harvard and Yale) and of course the EA community contains a very disproportionate percentage of elite college graduates. Also, although we used slightly different questions, it seems like the EA community may be more liberal than elite colleges, and we might expected higher self-reported nonheterosexuality in more liberal populations (comparing to Harvard and Yale again, they have around 12% somewhat/very conservatives, we have around 3% centre right or right- we have more ‘libertarians’, but if these are mostly socially liberal then the same might apply).
As I noted before though, I think that this is probably just a result of the particular question format used. I would expect more nonheterosexual responses where people can write in a free response compared to where they have to select either heterosexual or some other fixed category.
Let’s presume that the ‘share non-straight is’ a robust empirical finding and not an artifact of sample selection or of how the question was asked, or of the nonresponse etc. (We could dig into this further if it merited the effort)...
It is indeed somewhat surprised, but I am not who surprised, as I expect a group that is very different in some ways from the general population may likely be very different in other ways, and we may not always have a clear story for why. If we did want to look into it further it further, we might look into what share of the vegan population, or of the ‘computer science population’, in this mainly very-young age group, is not straight-identified. (of course those numbers may also be very very difficult together, particularly because of the difficulty of getting a representative sample of small populations, as I discuss here.
This may be very interesting from a sociological point of view but I am not sure if it is a first order important for us right now. That said, if we have time we may be able to get back to it.
Yeah I find this interesting and surprising too.