I’m a little concerned by the lack of response from org leaders (unless I missed something), and I think there’s a risk that CEA leaders and others might under-update from this.
Taking a role at CEA, then angling for growth and greater stewardship/control of the brand, is a bet that you would be a better force multiplier for the movement than the next candidate. We’re now expected to believe that a leader could fail the test described here and still somehow out-strategize or out-work the next best person.
Kudos to Frances for her moral courage in the face of significant obstacles. And kudos to all the org leaders with way less experience and fewer resources who are sweating out the development of their culture, HR processes, and accountability systems. It feels like invisible work but I see it, and my advisees see it.
To your point, it was very difficult watching CEA’s strategy conversations about community growth while all of this was happening behind the scenes. I couldn’t help but feel devastated and even a little bitter, in the sense of: what’s the point of trying to grow the community if we can’t even treat people with basic respect within our own organisation?
CEA is explicitly positioning itself to grow the community, take more lead on the brand, and provide stewardship. That means it needs to aim far higher than legal compliance when it comes to integrity and people-related decisions, and yet they appear to have struggled even with that. It’s hard for me to know whether leadership has truly internalised what this means.
While I did find CEA’s final apology sincere, it was somewhat HR-filtered, as most of CEA’s official communication is. Especially when it comes from leadership. On my call with the CEO, many of my questions were met with some version of “I wish I could provide more detail, but I legally can’t.” I understand that, but it means I’m left unable to tell whether leadership genuinely understands the weight of responsibility they carry, or the true severity of what occurred and what it signals about CEA as a central community-building organisation.
I do hope things get better. But I’ve been concerned for quite some time, and I remain very concerned.
At this point, it’s been more than 24hr, and CEA’s leadership team still hasn’t responded (on the EA forum, which they run!)
I’d like to explore the idea that the CEA leader(s) involved in mishandling this case should step down. The gap between the organization’s stated goals and the choices made here is wide enough to strain imagination. I’d like someone else to have an opportunity to steward community resources and growth who has not made these catastrophic judgement errors.
It’s possible that I am overreacting, but I’m not confident that’s the case. Frances, again, thank you for your courage. Hope that you are safe and well.
I agree that this situation raises some serious questions about the suitability of one or more people at CEA to continue in certain roles, but …
I suspect any response would need multiple layers of review within CEA and possibly by external legal counsel. Depending on the content, they probably should offer to run a response by Fran first. And there are likely to be some constraints on what the response can say in light of legal obligations to current and/or past employees. I think we need to consider that before drawing any adverse inferences from silence after a few days.
It’s also likely that there is a tension between individual CEA leadership employees/leaders’ interest in convincing the community that they are fit to serve in their roles and the institutional interests of CEA itself and/or the employee/leader’s obligations to CEA. The lawyers are certainly bound by attorney-client privilege. So I’d exercise caution in drawing negative inferences against an individual employee or leader without considering that their ability to defend themselves may be compromised.
The substance of my concern is how the issue was handled, not the communication delay — although I do think there are 80⁄20 ways to respond quickly without undue legal risk.
I have disagree voted specifically because I believe waiting at least 24hr before responding is a good practice, as it allows a global audience who check the Forum once per day to see Frances’ post before a CEA response.
Not “good practice” as in policy but “a good practice”, as I was replying to a comment saying that it was a bad thing that there had been no official CEA response in 24 hours on a platform that CEA owns.
I do not think that quick responses will help this situation. The time for a quick response meaningfully fixing things is long past. And I would think that any attempt to respond too quickly would be CEA attempting to control the narrative developing here in a way that is unfair to Frances and to the EA community. The purpose of this forum is to allow the EA community to meet and discuss things of importance to EA (which this is), and CEA hosts this forum to serve the EA community—not to control its brand image.
I also explained my disagree vote in order to imply that I was not disagreeing with the rest of the post. I do agree that allowing a misogynistic culture to develop to the degree an incident like this could happen is indicative of a failure of leadership capacity in EA’s leadership organisation. And this raises questions about if some of the leaders involved here really are the kind of people best able to lead the EA movement.
Thank you Pete. For what it’s worth, I have been told informally that CEA does expect to respond publicly. As others have mentioned, I imagine there are several employees/counsel who need to sign off on any response, and there may be internal disagreement or differing perspectives.
More importantly, I have been told CEA intends to provide “additional context.” Personally, I am incredibly hopeful that any added context will be in the direction of meaningful reckoning, rather than attempts to soften various leadership decisions by bringing up vague points around “legal obstacles,” or “balancing various employee privacy concerns,” and so on and so forth. I think the time for vague hedging, obscuring, gestures at “legality,” and softening has well passed.
I’m a little concerned by the lack of response from org leaders (unless I missed something), and I think there’s a risk that CEA leaders and others might under-update from this.
Taking a role at CEA, then angling for growth and greater stewardship/control of the brand, is a bet that you would be a better force multiplier for the movement than the next candidate. We’re now expected to believe that a leader could fail the test described here and still somehow out-strategize or out-work the next best person.
Kudos to Frances for her moral courage in the face of significant obstacles. And kudos to all the org leaders with way less experience and fewer resources who are sweating out the development of their culture, HR processes, and accountability systems. It feels like invisible work but I see it, and my advisees see it.
Thank you very much Pete.
To your point, it was very difficult watching CEA’s strategy conversations about community growth while all of this was happening behind the scenes. I couldn’t help but feel devastated and even a little bitter, in the sense of: what’s the point of trying to grow the community if we can’t even treat people with basic respect within our own organisation?
CEA is explicitly positioning itself to grow the community, take more lead on the brand, and provide stewardship. That means it needs to aim far higher than legal compliance when it comes to integrity and people-related decisions, and yet they appear to have struggled even with that. It’s hard for me to know whether leadership has truly internalised what this means.
While I did find CEA’s final apology sincere, it was somewhat HR-filtered, as most of CEA’s official communication is. Especially when it comes from leadership. On my call with the CEO, many of my questions were met with some version of “I wish I could provide more detail, but I legally can’t.” I understand that, but it means I’m left unable to tell whether leadership genuinely understands the weight of responsibility they carry, or the true severity of what occurred and what it signals about CEA as a central community-building organisation.
I do hope things get better. But I’ve been concerned for quite some time, and I remain very concerned.
At this point, it’s been more than 24hr, and CEA’s leadership team still hasn’t responded (on the EA forum, which they run!)
I’d like to explore the idea that the CEA leader(s) involved in mishandling this case should step down. The gap between the organization’s stated goals and the choices made here is wide enough to strain imagination. I’d like someone else to have an opportunity to steward community resources and growth who has not made these catastrophic judgement errors.
It’s possible that I am overreacting, but I’m not confident that’s the case. Frances, again, thank you for your courage. Hope that you are safe and well.
I agree that this situation raises some serious questions about the suitability of one or more people at CEA to continue in certain roles, but …
I suspect any response would need multiple layers of review within CEA and possibly by external legal counsel. Depending on the content, they probably should offer to run a response by Fran first. And there are likely to be some constraints on what the response can say in light of legal obligations to current and/or past employees. I think we need to consider that before drawing any adverse inferences from silence after a few days.
It’s also likely that there is a tension between individual CEA leadership employees/leaders’ interest in convincing the community that they are fit to serve in their roles and the institutional interests of CEA itself and/or the employee/leader’s obligations to CEA. The lawyers are certainly bound by attorney-client privilege. So I’d exercise caution in drawing negative inferences against an individual employee or leader without considering that their ability to defend themselves may be compromised.
The substance of my concern is how the issue was handled, not the communication delay — although I do think there are 80⁄20 ways to respond quickly without undue legal risk.
I have disagree voted specifically because I believe waiting at least 24hr before responding is a good practice, as it allows a global audience who check the Forum once per day to see Frances’ post before a CEA response.
Why is it good practice to allow a post to be on the forum for some time before the response is available to readers?
Not “good practice” as in policy but “a good practice”, as I was replying to a comment saying that it was a bad thing that there had been no official CEA response in 24 hours on a platform that CEA owns.
I do not think that quick responses will help this situation. The time for a quick response meaningfully fixing things is long past. And I would think that any attempt to respond too quickly would be CEA attempting to control the narrative developing here in a way that is unfair to Frances and to the EA community. The purpose of this forum is to allow the EA community to meet and discuss things of importance to EA (which this is), and CEA hosts this forum to serve the EA community—not to control its brand image.
I also explained my disagree vote in order to imply that I was not disagreeing with the rest of the post. I do agree that allowing a misogynistic culture to develop to the degree an incident like this could happen is indicative of a failure of leadership capacity in EA’s leadership organisation. And this raises questions about if some of the leaders involved here really are the kind of people best able to lead the EA movement.
That seems reasonable, and I appreciate folks’ feedback via agree and disagree votes.
Thank you Pete. For what it’s worth, I have been told informally that CEA does expect to respond publicly. As others have mentioned, I imagine there are several employees/counsel who need to sign off on any response, and there may be internal disagreement or differing perspectives.
More importantly, I have been told CEA intends to provide “additional context.” Personally, I am incredibly hopeful that any added context will be in the direction of meaningful reckoning, rather than attempts to soften various leadership decisions by bringing up vague points around “legal obstacles,” or “balancing various employee privacy concerns,” and so on and so forth. I think the time for vague hedging, obscuring, gestures at “legality,” and softening has well passed.