Ah, I see the issue now—you are assuming that I’m saying that feminism has a model that we should directly emulate, whereas I am just saying that they are dealing with similar issues, and we have things to learn from them. In short, there are leaders in feminism who have been working on this issue, with some limited success and yes, a lot of failures. However, even if they were completely 100% failing, then there is still a very important thing that we can learn from them: what have they tried that didn’t work? It is just as important to figure out pitfalls and failed projects as it is to try and find successful case studies.
The key is getting that conversation started, and comparing notes. Your perception of feminism and the problems therein may change in the process, but most importantly we all may learn some important lessons that can be applied in EA (even if they do consist primarily of “hey this one solution really doesn’t work, if you do anything, do something else”).
If you are truly 100% not convinced that we can learn this from feminism, then that’s OK: you can talk to leaders of any other social movement instead, since many of them have dealt with and thought about similar problems. Your local union reps may be a good place to start!
I am sorry to hear that your encounters with feminism have primarily been divisive. My experience has been a bit different, and it may help for me to go into some quick details (OK, actually this post became quite long, which I apologize for—it’s probably approaching blog length) and draw parallels with EA.
It took me a year to actually start engaging with EA. I love cost effectiveness, marginal thinking, and rigorously thinking about how to do the most good. My friends and colleagues do as well, but they do not engage with EA. To me, EA appeared, from the outside, to be a group that lays claim to something that is not unique to them, and then looks down on others—a very insular community with members that actively trash and condescend people who ‘are not EA enough’. Other critics have expressed this view as well, and my initial forays into EA did not help this perception—some of my views are not standard EA views, and I had multiple people without economics backgrounds jump on me to explain that I was wrong while condescendingly explaining basic economics to me. This would be fine, if they were actually correct to do so—most of the times the loudest critiques were the most rudimentary and off the mark (for reference, I got my masters in economics and work directly in integrating economic thinking into aid programs, so I have a decent idea of what bad economic thinking looks like). Needless to say, these experiences and others left a sour taste in my mouth, and so I stopped engaging for a while.
This is similar to some people’s experiences with feminism—when initially trying to break in, it can seem like a very insular community driven entirely by yelling at people who are not ‘feminist enough’. I liked feminist ideals in undergrad, similar to how I enjoyed EA ideals, but avoided it because my perception was that I would not get anything from engaging in feminism because I would be expunged for ‘not being feminist enough’ (similar to why I avoided EA). I also didn’t see a clear reason for engaging, since many of my friends already had feminist ideals without being a direct part of the feminist movement (similar to my friends and colleagues who hold EA ideas without engaging with EA).
The moment that really changed everything was in the first year of my masters, where I was hitting a economic problem that the tools I was using just could not solve—I went to my adviser, complaining that no one seemed to have thought about this problem before, to which he retorted “you know that the feminist economists have been working on this for decades, right? Talk to Professor XYZ and they’ll help you”. And I did, and next thing I knew I was getting a specialty in gender analysis of economics—because as I started to get more involved, I realized that behind that initial barrier was a rich world of diverse thinking on a variety of topics. I truly believe now that the most advanced and innovative thinking in economics today comes from feminist economists.
And it wasn’t just academic feminists—once I got past that initial barrier, I started looking more into the very groups I originally avoided, and I soon realized that a lot of feminist activists were actively fighting to break down the barrier that I encountered, by advocating for ‘calling in’ rather than ‘calling out’ (among other things). Once you’re inside, it is a very supportive and tolerant community, and it has helped me (and many others) grow as a person and as a thinker more than anything else in my life has.
Going back to EA, as I mentioned before there is a very similar barrier, in which to an outside person a lot of the people ‘representing EA’ online can be quite nasty to outsiders and divergent views. Once I got past this initial barrier, I realized that the majority of people identifying with EA are actually quite nice, and I realized that there are many in the EA movement who are actively trying to make people’s first experience of EA more amicable and to make the movement as a whole more tolerant and respective of divergent views. It’s essentially the EA movement’s equivalent of the ‘calling-in’ problem, and the point that these discussions are happening make me very hopeful for the future.
None of this really helps answer the ‘what about a formal mechanism’ question directly, I just want to try and express my belief that better engagement with social movements like feminism (all of whom have dealt with similar problems to the EA movement!) is important. Offhand saying that ‘feminism failed on this point, so we can’t learn from them’ without really engaging with members of the feminist movement is not a strong way forward.
In terms of examples off the top of my head of how feminist actors have tried to mitigate the ‘bad actor’ problem, my first thought is the issue of problematic ‘allies’. The response has to write guidance (less formal version here) on how to be a good ally, and to generally set forth ‘community norms’ that show up in various places (blogs, posters, listservs, whatever). When someone does not adhere to these norms, in the best of cases you can help them understand why going against the norm is bad and help them be a better ally, and in the worst of situations the movement as a whole at least has some plausible deniability (“don’t tell us that person is representative of us, they’re clearly breaking all of the norms that we’ve clearly detailed all of these places!”).