After some recent discussion on the forum and on twitter about negative experiences that women have had in EA community spaces, I wanted to start a discussion about concrete actions that could be taken to make EA spaces safer, more comortable, and more inclusive for women. The community health team describes some of their work related to interpersonal harm here, but I expect there's a lot more that the wider community can do to prevent sexual harrassment and abusive behavior, particularly when it comes to setting up norms that proactively prevent problems rather than just dealing with them afterwards. Some prompts for discussion:
- What negative experiences have you had, and what do you wish the EA community had done differently in response to them?
- What specific behaviors have you seen which you wish were less common/wish there were stronger norms against? What would have helped you push back against them?
- As the movement becomes larger and more professionalized, how can we enable people to set clear boundaries and deal with conflicts of interest in workplaces and grantmaking?
- How can we set clearer norms related to informal power structures (e.g. people who are respected or well-connected within EA, community organizers, etc)?
- What codes of conduct should we have around events like EA Global? Here's the current code; are there things which should be included in there that aren't currently (e.g. explicitly talking about not asking people out in work-related 1:1s)?
- What are the best ways to get feedback to the right people on an ongoing basis? E.g. what sort of reporting mechanisms would make sure that concerning patterns in specific EA groups get noticed early? And which ones are currently in place?
- How can we enable people who are best at creating safe, welcoming environments to share that knowledge? Are there specific posts which should be written about best practices and lessons learned (e.g. additions to the community health resources here)?
I'd welcome people's thoughts and experiences, whether detailed discussions or just off-the-cuff comments. I'm particularly excited about suggestions for ways to translate these ideas to concrete actions going forward.
EDIT: here's a google form for people who want to comment anonymously; the answers should be visible here. And feel free to reach out to me in messages or in person if you have suggestions for how to do this better.
I’ve been involved with EA since 2015. I think there’s a lot of room for EA to do better when it comes to inclusivity, especially regarding gender (but also race/class/other identity aspects).
The gender skew in EA exacerbates a lot of the issues related to gender. The gender ratio varies a ton across different geographies and cause areas, but in my experience it ranges from roughly 50/50 to overwhelmingly male (70/30 male/female per 2020 EA survey). When I walk into a meetup and I’m the only woman there, that affects my experience. This was particularly the case when I was first getting involved with EA as a teenager: part of deciding whether you stay involved with a community is your answer to “am I welcome here? Is this community for people like me?,” and repeatedly having experiences where I was one of the only women present gave me the sense that this community wasn’t for people like me. That led me to engage less with EA, though I eventually returned; I suspect it’s more common for women and people from underrepresented groups to “bounce off” of EA like this. It is genuinely surprising in many ways that EA doesn’t have more women, as women tend to be way more involved in the non-profit sector more broadly. It doesn’t have to be this way.
But the gender skew also affects things when there are issues. If someone makes some comment that makes you uncomfortable and the rest of your male conversational partners laugh it off, that’s not super helpful. I think that, as a community, we should work to reduce the gender skew—through making EA spaces more welcoming to women, investing in mentorship programs, etc.—and actively take efforts to mitigate issues created by the gender skew. On a macro level, fewer women in the room when decision-making is occurring means that issues that affect women are less likely to receive their appropriate attention. That necessitates that institutions make a more active effort to pay attention to issues that effect women, collect women’s opinions on issues that affect things, and yes, have more women in the room when decisions are happening. On a micro level, note when you’re at a get-together and it’s overwhelmingly monolithic (in terms of race, gender, etc.). Pay attention to how that affects how you treat people in the non-dominant group.
(splitting into a second comment b/c of length)