Outreach in groups with higher ratios of women: this is the one thing that comes to my mind every time I think about this. As long as EA is downstream of a few male-dominated disciplines/fields, it seems virtually impossible for the gender ratio to change.
Here’s a diagram I made to explain my thinking. The width of the arrow represents how many people are coming from each field, and the colored surface in each figure represents the gender ratio in each field:
If correct, this picture shows that you’d need to do something against this very strong society-wide selection pressure. Short of changing the gender ratios of the disciplines that EA is downstream of (society already spending significant amounts of resources on this), you would need to change which fields EA is getting people from. So here the outreach intervention you propose is equivalent to increasing the width of the arrows that represent female-dominated fields.
I disagree, because when I looked into gender dynamics in EA London, recruitment was not the issue. EA London 2016-2018 had as many women as men attending events as a first-time attendee, but they were much less likely to keep attending after their first, second or third event.
It would be helpful to know the likelihood of continued attendance broken down by combinations of gender and academic field. It’s plausible to me that the breakdown of academic fields between “women coming to their first EA event” and “men coming to their first EA event” could be significantly different, and that this difference could explain much of the difference in continued attendance. It’s also plausible that, after controlling for academic field, women are significantly less likely to continue attending than men (e.g., women with a STEM background are less likely to continue attending than men with a STEM background, etc.)
My hunch is that both of these dynamics play a part in explaining lower levels of continued attendance by women. My confidence in the relative magnitude of each effect is pretty low.
I would be interested in more data about what people in EA’s professional backgrounds are to see if the gender ratios are different from the gender ratio of the wider (non-EA) professions. It seems plausible to me that the framing of EA (heavily data-centric, emotionally detached) could attract/appeal to men more, whereas the focus on social impact and doing good might attract more women.
Outreach in groups with higher ratios of women: this is the one thing that comes to my mind every time I think about this. As long as EA is downstream of a few male-dominated disciplines/fields, it seems virtually impossible for the gender ratio to change.
Here’s a diagram I made to explain my thinking. The width of the arrow represents how many people are coming from each field, and the colored surface in each figure represents the gender ratio in each field:
If correct, this picture shows that you’d need to do something against this very strong society-wide selection pressure. Short of changing the gender ratios of the disciplines that EA is downstream of (society already spending significant amounts of resources on this), you would need to change which fields EA is getting people from. So here the outreach intervention you propose is equivalent to increasing the width of the arrows that represent female-dominated fields.
I disagree, because when I looked into gender dynamics in EA London, recruitment was not the issue. EA London 2016-2018 had as many women as men attending events as a first-time attendee, but they were much less likely to keep attending after their first, second or third event.
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/2RfQT7cybfS8zoy43/are-men-more-likely-to-attend-ea-london-events-attendance
It would be helpful to know the likelihood of continued attendance broken down by combinations of gender and academic field. It’s plausible to me that the breakdown of academic fields between “women coming to their first EA event” and “men coming to their first EA event” could be significantly different, and that this difference could explain much of the difference in continued attendance. It’s also plausible that, after controlling for academic field, women are significantly less likely to continue attending than men (e.g., women with a STEM background are less likely to continue attending than men with a STEM background, etc.)
My hunch is that both of these dynamics play a part in explaining lower levels of continued attendance by women. My confidence in the relative magnitude of each effect is pretty low.
True, not only outreach but also sufficient engagement/retention is needed in order to reliably increase the ratio.
I would be interested in more data about what people in EA’s professional backgrounds are to see if the gender ratios are different from the gender ratio of the wider (non-EA) professions. It seems plausible to me that the framing of EA (heavily data-centric, emotionally detached) could attract/appeal to men more, whereas the focus on social impact and doing good might attract more women.