There is absolutely no necessity for anyone to be “monsters” in order for the picture painted in Frances post to be accurate and her anger justified though.
All your contributions in this thread seem to be marked by the idea that people would have to be unusually bad in some way to fail to deal well with sexual harassment. But I don’t see why we should be particularly confident that the base rate of orgs dealing badly with sexual misconduct, in ways that-*correctly*-look really bad to outsiders when the facts come out is all that low. There have been numerous cases where schools, universities, religious institutions etc. have covered up far worse conduct than Riley’s: i.e. sexual abuse scandals in the Catholic church as one example among many. Now, of course, we typically don’t hear about the cases where sexual harassment or abuse was promptly identified and the perpetrator fired/imprisoned, unless the perpetrator was independently famous. And there are a lot of people and institutions in the world, so maybe those cases are way more common. But I don’t see any particular reason to be confident of that.
But also, people are generally very good at avoiding believing things that are extremely inconvenient for them, without really noticing they are doing it, and without conscious malice. Most of us are much better at doing this in my view than we think we are. When HR originally received Riley’s doc, they had a choice between 1) trying to start sexual harassment proceedings against him, and 2) overlooking the fact that what he had written about Frances was wholly inappropriate, and possibly malicious, and concentrating on his own complaints. Doing 2) was no doubt made easier by the fact that the doc was apparently not “about” Frances specifically. Now, if they took choice 1), that was a lot of hassle and unpleasantness for them:
A) Potentially having to directly punish Riley. People don’t generally like significantly deliberately harming people they know, and have no personal beef with, and will avoid it if they can. This is maybe especially true of the kind of friendly people personish person who wants to work in HR, although that is only a guess on my part.
B) Having to deal with Riley potentially portraying any investigation of him as retaliatory for his complaints. Even a completely baseless accusation of that is likely to be a huge stress for the people on the receiving end of it. This is likely to have been particularly unpleasant with the kind of person who writes a massive doc giving his detailed personal opinions on multiple colleagues, including for at least one person their mental health, sexual victimization and his own romantic feelings for them, because anyone who does something that inappropriate and obsessive can’t be trust to act normally during a complaints process. This is true even if Riley is in fact a vulnerable, naive person with no malicious intentions, let alone if he is actually vengeful.
C) Having to either upset Frances by informing her about the doc, and having an excruciatingly awkward conversation with her about it, or alternatively NOT inform her even while disciplining Riley, and admit to themselves that they are concealing from Frances that one of her colleagues has sexually harassed her.
On the other hand, if they take choice 2) and just fail to recognize how inappropriate the stuff Riley said about Frances was, then they can realistically hope that Frances never finds out, and they don’t have to upset Riley or Frances, or having any awkward conversations about rape and sexualization of rape victims with anyone or face the consequences of being accused or retaliating against a complainant. They could just hope that Frances never found out about the doc, something that may well have happened if Riley himself had not shown it beyond HR. (Unless the person who informed Frances was themselves in HR anyway). Then they could avoid any stress or hurt feelings. Once the CEO and the COO found out, they also had the same incentives to get this wrong, but with the additional incentive that they could decide to defer to HR’s judgments, since they are the orgs experts on well, HR issues.
I say all this not to excuse anyone at CEA. If this is the psychological dynamics of what happened-which I obviously don’t know-that’s not all that exculpatory. Not dealing with sexual harassment properly because you want to avoid awkwardness/fuss/punishment and you’re in HR or management, is like not running into a burning building as a firefighter because you don’t want to get burnt: it’s your job to get past this stuff! But claims that Frances’ account requires an implausible level of malice or incompetence on the part of multiple people seem wrong to me..
There is absolutely no necessity for anyone to be “monsters” in order for the picture painted in Frances post to be accurate and her anger justified though.
All your contributions in this thread seem to be marked by the idea that people would have to be unusually bad in some way to fail to deal well with sexual harassment. But I don’t see why we should be particularly confident that the base rate of orgs dealing badly with sexual misconduct, in ways that-*correctly*-look really bad to outsiders when the facts come out is all that low. There have been numerous cases where schools, universities, religious institutions etc. have covered up far worse conduct than Riley’s: i.e. sexual abuse scandals in the Catholic church as one example among many. Now, of course, we typically don’t hear about the cases where sexual harassment or abuse was promptly identified and the perpetrator fired/imprisoned, unless the perpetrator was independently famous. And there are a lot of people and institutions in the world, so maybe those cases are way more common. But I don’t see any particular reason to be confident of that.
More importantly. this isn’t even EA’s first scandal where a major org themselves admitted they dealt badly with sexual misconduct: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/4CBoJ5jgmGfdMFnAE/ev-investigation-into-owen-and-community-health In the face of that, I don’t see why we should find it particularly implausible that in another case, an EA org dealt badly with sexual misconduct.
But also, people are generally very good at avoiding believing things that are extremely inconvenient for them, without really noticing they are doing it, and without conscious malice. Most of us are much better at doing this in my view than we think we are. When HR originally received Riley’s doc, they had a choice between 1) trying to start sexual harassment proceedings against him, and 2) overlooking the fact that what he had written about Frances was wholly inappropriate, and possibly malicious, and concentrating on his own complaints. Doing 2) was no doubt made easier by the fact that the doc was apparently not “about” Frances specifically. Now, if they took choice 1), that was a lot of hassle and unpleasantness for them:
A) Potentially having to directly punish Riley. People don’t generally like significantly deliberately harming people they know, and have no personal beef with, and will avoid it if they can. This is maybe especially true of the kind of friendly people personish person who wants to work in HR, although that is only a guess on my part.
B) Having to deal with Riley potentially portraying any investigation of him as retaliatory for his complaints. Even a completely baseless accusation of that is likely to be a huge stress for the people on the receiving end of it. This is likely to have been particularly unpleasant with the kind of person who writes a massive doc giving his detailed personal opinions on multiple colleagues, including for at least one person their mental health, sexual victimization and his own romantic feelings for them, because anyone who does something that inappropriate and obsessive can’t be trust to act normally during a complaints process. This is true even if Riley is in fact a vulnerable, naive person with no malicious intentions, let alone if he is actually vengeful.
C) Having to either upset Frances by informing her about the doc, and having an excruciatingly awkward conversation with her about it, or alternatively NOT inform her even while disciplining Riley, and admit to themselves that they are concealing from Frances that one of her colleagues has sexually harassed her.
On the other hand, if they take choice 2) and just fail to recognize how inappropriate the stuff Riley said about Frances was, then they can realistically hope that Frances never finds out, and they don’t have to upset Riley or Frances, or having any awkward conversations about rape and sexualization of rape victims with anyone or face the consequences of being accused or retaliating against a complainant. They could just hope that Frances never found out about the doc, something that may well have happened if Riley himself had not shown it beyond HR. (Unless the person who informed Frances was themselves in HR anyway). Then they could avoid any stress or hurt feelings. Once the CEO and the COO found out, they also had the same incentives to get this wrong, but with the additional incentive that they could decide to defer to HR’s judgments, since they are the orgs experts on well, HR issues.
I say all this not to excuse anyone at CEA. If this is the psychological dynamics of what happened-which I obviously don’t know-that’s not all that exculpatory. Not dealing with sexual harassment properly because you want to avoid awkwardness/fuss/punishment and you’re in HR or management, is like not running into a burning building as a firefighter because you don’t want to get burnt: it’s your job to get past this stuff! But claims that Frances’ account requires an implausible level of malice or incompetence on the part of multiple people seem wrong to me..