Until June 2018, Eve studied early medieval history, languages and literature at the University of Cambridge, as well as helping out with EA Cambridge (UK). She then worked full-time as a group organiser for EA Cambridge for three years, before joining the Community Health team at CEA as an assistant and generalist.
evemccormick
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Hey, thanks for this :)
EA Cambridge (UK) has been tracking gender ratios at events for several years now, and we have fairly complete data for the last year. As far as I know, this hasn’t yet been written up or shared in any formal way, but that is something I would like to do in the near future.
On the topic of pub socials, I don’t find the gender bias surprising. The pub socials which we started running this year, aimed at non-students and postgrads, were almost always heavily male-dominated. Other types of pub social that we’ve run, targetted at newcomers, people somewhat engaged, and people deeply engaged in the community respectively, have similarly been male-dominated. At least two women, despite being deeply involved in the EA Cambridge community, have mentioned to me that they do not feel comfortable at pub socials. So while I think there are probably several reasons why fewer women attend socials in general (e.g. to do with women often feeling less comfortable in situations where they’re expected to talk on a topic, especially when they’re new), pub environments might compound the problem.
Very much looking forward to reading the results of your research about what motivates men and women to attend events :)
Thanks for this post! You might be interested in the podcast Humanise Me, which is primarily focused around this idea of learning lessons from organised religion about how to build better secular communities. It’s not exactly information-dense, but I think there’s some good nuggets in there. I started listening to it a few years ago when I first became a local EA group organiser.