An example of a particular practice that I think might look kind of innocuous but can be quite harmful to women and minorities in EA is what I’m going to call “buzz talk”. Buzz talk involves making highly subjective assessments of people’s abilities, putting a lot of weight in those assessments, and communicating them to others in the community. Buzz talk can be very powerful, but the beneficiaries of buzz seem to disproportionately be those that conform to a stereotype of brilliance: a white, upper class male might be “the next big thing” when his black, working class female counterpart wouldn’t even be noticed. These are the sorts of small, unintentional behaviors that I that it can be good for people to try to be conscious of.
I also think it’s really unfortunate that there’s such a large schism between those involved in the social justice movement and people who largely disagree with this movement (think: SJWs and anti-SJWs). The EA community attracts people from both of groups, and I think it can cause people to see this whole issue through the lens of whatever group they identify with. It might be helpful if people tried to drop this identity baggage when discussing diversity issues in EA.
On individual advice: I’d add something about remembering that you are always in charge and should set your own boundaries. You choose what you want to do with your life, how much of EA you accept, and how much you want to use to influence your choices. If you’re a professional acrobat and want to give 10% of your income to effective charities, that’s a great way to be an EA. If someone points out that you also have a degree in computer science and could go work on AI safety, it’s fine to reply “I know but I don’t want to do that”. You don’t need to defend or justify your choices on EA grounds.
(That doesn’t mean you might not want to defend some choice you’ve made. The research side of EA is all about making and breaking down claims about what actions do the most good. But people’s personal choices about how to act don’t themselves constitute claims about the best way to act.)
EA is a highly intellectual community, so I worry that people feel the need to justify or defend anything they do or any choice they make though an EA lens, and this might make EA infiltrate their life more than they are actually comfortable with and fail to set the right boundaries. People should do EA things because and to the extent that they want to, and the EA community should be there as a resource to help them do that. But EA should justify itself to you, not the other way round.