Epistemic status: Very anecdotal and probably unimportant.
I previously took part in a program called Teach For Australia (TFA), similar to the better known Teach First and Teach For America programs. I found the people in this program much more “like me” in a bunch of ways than any other group I’d encountered until then. I then discovered EA, and found EAs even more “like me”, but in similar ways. And I have a loose impression that EA and TFA both disproportionately draw from fairly similar types of people. (E.g., ambitious, impact-oriented, career-prioritising, critical thinking, privileged young graduates of prestigious universities. Probably also more often non-religious than is typical—though by a smaller margin than is the case in EA—which is relevant in light of RyanCarey’s comment.)
It also seemed to me that people in the TFA program were quite surprisingly often married or engaged, despite their young average age. I didn’t do any systematic data collection, but of the group of me and the 3 other TFAs I was closest with, the average age is ~27, and 75% are married or would’ve had their wedding by now if not for COVID (and also started their current relationships 5-10 years ago, so there wasn’t even much time in the “single” category).
This makes this data somewhat more surprising to me, as it seems to weakly suggest that some of the differences between EAs and society at large may increase marriage rates and reduce single rates, and that other differences are having to push hard to offset that. (Though I guess that that claim, as stated, should be fairly obvious.)
Epistemic status: Very anecdotal and probably unimportant.
I previously took part in a program called Teach For Australia (TFA), similar to the better known Teach First and Teach For America programs. I found the people in this program much more “like me” in a bunch of ways than any other group I’d encountered until then. I then discovered EA, and found EAs even more “like me”, but in similar ways. And I have a loose impression that EA and TFA both disproportionately draw from fairly similar types of people. (E.g., ambitious, impact-oriented, career-prioritising, critical thinking, privileged young graduates of prestigious universities. Probably also more often non-religious than is typical—though by a smaller margin than is the case in EA—which is relevant in light of RyanCarey’s comment.)
It also seemed to me that people in the TFA program were quite surprisingly often married or engaged, despite their young average age. I didn’t do any systematic data collection, but of the group of me and the 3 other TFAs I was closest with, the average age is ~27, and 75% are married or would’ve had their wedding by now if not for COVID (and also started their current relationships 5-10 years ago, so there wasn’t even much time in the “single” category).
This makes this data somewhat more surprising to me, as it seems to weakly suggest that some of the differences between EAs and society at large may increase marriage rates and reduce single rates, and that other differences are having to push hard to offset that. (Though I guess that that claim, as stated, should be fairly obvious.)