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(writing personally here, not for any organization)

Some good questions raised here!

I know that EA organizations have thought about this, for example when Giving What We Can was working on the dashboard that would show projected lifetime earnings and donations. I think it’s really hard to provide a broad overview of differences that doesn’t sound insulting or over-generalizing.

So much of the wage gap by gender reflects time away from work after having children, and individuals have significant choice over that. For example, I took a lot more leave (from a non-EA job I disliked) with my first child than I did with my second two from my EA job. In the US it’s common to take more like 10 weeks of leave, so the post’s use of a year of maternity leave as the default is pretty different from my experience.

(But I recognize that a lot of choices about how much time to take depends on income, childcare options, the children’s needs, and how flexible the parents’ work is. I don’t want to frame it all as completely up to personal preference. For example, my partner and I found ourselves unexpectedly without childcare when our eight-month-old refused to eat at daycare.)

On the informal side, there are groups for women and nonbinary people in EA and parents (and people considering parenting) in EA.

Some non-EA resources that I’ve found at least somewhat helpful:

I Know How She Does It by Laura Vanderkam—based on working mothers’ time logs, showing how they actually use their time. Both the book and her podcast are definitely aimed at high earners /​ high spenders, which I found frustrating at times. But they’re useful for taking your time seriously. I often find time management advice by non-parents irrelevant, but Vanderkam is a parent of five.

ParentData blog and books by Emily Oster—less about career, but an economist-y take on a bunch of parenting questions.

Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids—maybe will help you worry less about things you can’t change, but I find there’s still plenty to worry about.

Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In is in this genre, but honestly I don’t remember any takeaways.

And some pieces by EAs about parenting:

Parenting: things I wish I could tell my past self, Michelle Hutchinson

How to be productive before your baby turns one, Ruth Grace

My experience returning to work after having a baby, Rose Hadshar

Equal parenting advice for dads, Jeff Kaufman (plus lots of his other parenting posts)

Parenting and effective altruism, Bernadette Young

How much will pregnancy affect your health and work? me

What startup founders should think about before having kids me

How much do kids cost? The first 5 years me

More posts by EAs

Thanks for writing this post! I think promoting diversity in EA is incredibly important and I appreciate your contribution to it.

However, I get a feeling here that you’ve started with an underlying assumption that “EA should cater to women”, which I don’t see the argument for. Certainly, if there’s a stark lack of women throughout EA, I’d feel that there’s a problem that needs to be specifically addressed—but I don’t think this is the case.

You present information about the academic fields that correlate with participation in EA, and note that there’s a gender disparity that matches the one we seem to observe in EA. To me, this seems like evidence that there isn’t a problem within EA, but a result of broader, more complicated dynamics elsewhere. On the other hand, the other demographic data you present on other minorities seems like a more significant issue.

For instance, the rest of the 80k article you cite is clear about the fact that the framework isn’t applicable to everyone, and I think the choice of whether to have children is just one of many possible reasons the framework might not strictly apply to a person. And while demographic data shows that the work of having children affects women disproportionately, non-women who intend to parent would also need to consider the same unanswered questions.

Because of these dynamics, I don’t think that the claim you’ve made here, that more resources should be directed in a way that addresses the gender disparity, is substantiated.

I’m curious to hear from where you’ve gotten the sense that the EA community uses a ‘male-default position’ - I’ve never felt this.

(As a side note, if you haven’t heard of them, there’s magnifymentoring—previously WANBAM)

As a woman who’s been involved in EA for a long time, I agree with parts of this post, but I also find parts of it make frustrating assumptions. For example, I know several men in the EA community taking time off work or planning to take time off work in order to raise their children. If your hypothesis is correct and EA is focused on the male experience, why wouldn’t it include them?

I think a more likely explanation is that these topics are hard to think and write about and no one’s managed to do it yet. Up until a couple years ago, there were only a couple thousand EAs globally—so when I see an article that should exist but doesn’t, my first reaction is there’s a gap because no one’s had time to do the topic justice, not that the community doesn’t care.

Strong upvoted. This got me to ponder the thought experiment of imagining an EA community that assumed members and interested people were female by default. I do think that EA content would look somewhat different in that world, primarily in addressing questions about kids. I’d expect that advice and discussion about whether, when, and how to have and raise kids would be a very prominent topic. I might expect talent-contained EA orgs to try and differentiate themselves through perks like on-site childcare. I might also expect more weird and out there stuff that’s targeted at related questions, like maybe in that world, you’d see posts arguing that the most impactful career you can have is being a competent and value-aligned nanny for another EA.

Imagining that world gives me a sense of how the current world looks somewhat male by default, and where we might look to change that.

Upvoted.

This has a lot of good thinking and good research, and more people should see it.

I almost didn’t read this because of the title; I imagine that twelve people bounced off right there for every person who clicked the link, and if asked for advice I’d recommend changing the title to something more indicative of the post itself such as: “Common Advice For EAs Doesn’t Account For or Analyze the Costs Incurred by Women in Childrearing” (or something pithier to the same general effect).

In particular I’d avoid the word cater, it comes across as value-laden and negative. I initially expected this post to be written by an angry man.

It would also greatly benefit from a concise Key Takeaways at the top, as One-time pad and Guy Raveh have already said. That would also signal to the reader what they’re going to read, which is important because people need to make a snap judgement about whether it’s worth their time to continue.

(I’m always awkward around giving advice; if any of this seems brusque or rude please know that it wasn’t intended that way and I appreciated the article.

This opening

According to a flagship Effective Altruism (EA) organisation, you have 80,000 hours in your career over a lifetime: 40 hours per week, 50 weeks per year, for 40 years. But does this hold true for women? And if not, what are the implications of this (and related assumptions) for the EA research community and the practical EA community?

is almost perfectly designed to not be read. When I first read the post, my eyes skimmed through this without my brain processing it. I would have read it, if it had been written in normal font and if it were not above what looks like a stock photo.

Upon rereading it, I agree with my brain’s initial learned heuristic of not parsing things written in heading text above what look like stock photos. Don’t waste people’s time beating around the bush or burying the lede, people want to know what they’re reading as soon as possible so that they know if they should read it through and pick over the particulars.

If I’d written it, the opening would read:

A key assumption in 80,000 hours’ advice is that you have 80,000 hours in your career over a lifetime: 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year, for 40 years. But this doesn’t hold for women, who swallow the larger half of the opportunity cost inherent to raising children.

take whatever from that you find helpful, and disregard whatever sounds to you clunky.

Moving on:

This post looks to explore the following 3 questions:

a) Does EA cater to women, as both a research field and a practical community?

b) If not, what (if any) female-specific considerations ought to be taken into

account by EA?

c) What (if any) practical steps can be taken to ensure that EA is more inclusive

of women, and considerate of women’s lives?

This is another point where as I reader I might have jumped off. You aren’t being paid by how long we stay on this webpage before clicking away! There’s no reason to imitate the style of websites which are paid by how long people have to stay on the webpage afore they can tell what they’re reading. This is safe to cut.

In seeking to answer these questions, this article does the following:

1. Sets out what EA is.

2. Assesses the demographics of EAs (members of the EA community) using available data and examines whether current EA career guidance accounts for women.

3. Outlines my personal experiences of EA.

4. Looks at taking women into account—particularly the impact of having children upon their earning potential. This includes an applied analysis of the Giving What We Can Pledge.

5. Issues preliminary recommendations for how the EA community can cater to women.

I’d make this clearer and more concise, for example:

Table of Contents:

1. What is effective altruism?

2. Demographics of effective altruism

3. My personal experience with effective altruism

4. Taking women into account (includes analysis of the Giving What We Can Pledge)

5. Preliminary recommendations

I really like this whole part:

How much of the article should you read?

And in fact I like the rest of it as well. Once the article hits its stride, it wears its use to the reader on its sleeve.

Thanks for writing it!

The “Career progression and earning potential” section was so difficult to read; I know the point is to raise awareness about expectation-setting and not viewing men as default, but the point that sticks in my mind is the old “having kids is a career killer.”

As a woman on the fence about having kids, the thought of literally making the world worse (not saving 6.8 lives) for something that would also damage my career is...so awful. Calling this information to others’ attention needs to be done with care to avoid the sort of “women are less valuable EAs according to math” conclusion. I know this isn’t the conclusion, and I know we care about the same problem (women doing well in EA). But I found this post profoundly discouraging.

I can’t figure out why this didn’t get more traction. This post seems extremely relevant and brought up well considered points that I’m surprised I’ve never encountered before. This subject seems fundamental to life changing career decisions, and highly relevant to both EA earning to give and EA career impacts. I also can’t spot any surface level presentation reasons it might have gotten overlooked or prematurely dismissed.

Edit: Ah, I think what happened is it was evaluated by the suggested actions when scrolling to see the outcomes/​results. I am also much less positive these are good approaches to addressing the problem. They are offered without much evidence, and transparently acknowledged as such, but it’s potentially the posts biggest most obvious fault.

Excellent post.

Thanks for bringing these issues out. I think your case that EA participation is not very diverse is strong.

I think you’re right that spending money has to be part of the solution.

My own suggestion would be some kind of survey or study of underrepresented groups to gather more information about why they participate, barriers they see or experience etc.

This could be a good first step if it doesn’t exist already?

Edited to add—if it turns out a survey is a good idea, I’m happy to help.

I think this post would do a better job of furthering your (laudable) aims if it was written more concisely.