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.
A few brief comments.
1.) Clearly this is better than the alternative where the same considerations are applied to other ways of participating in the community.
2.) My issue isn't particularly with the community health team, but with a general attitude that I've often encountered among EAs in more informal discussions. Sadly, informal discussions are hard to provide concrete evidence of, so I pointed to an example that I take to be less egregious, though I still think on the wrong side of things here. I am more concerned by the general attitude that is held by some EAs I've spoken to than two specific lines of a specific post.
3.) People are banned from the forum for being rude in relatively minor ways. And yet let's imagine a hypothetical case where someone is accused of serious wrongdoing and further are specifically accused of carrying out some elements of wrongdoing via online social networks. It would seem weird to ban the first person for minor rudeness, but give the second person access to a platform that can allow them to build status and communicate with people via just the sort of medium that they allegedly used to carry out previous wrongdoing. Yet I think this is a plausible outcome of the current policies on when to ban people and how to react to interpersonal harm.
4.) I agree that it's a different question; I still don't think it's a difficult one. For a start, I think it's a little odd to conceive of this as "suppressing" content. People can still post content in lots of other places, and indeed other people can share it on the EA forum if they want to. Further, I don't think you can separate out enabling harm from posting to the forum, given that forum posts can confer status to people and status can help people to commit harm. So I think that the current policy just does enable harm. I think enabling this harm is the wrong call.
5.) I also think we could run the consequentialist case here, pointing to the fact that other people might not contribute to EA because they find the EA attitude to these cases concerning and don't feel safe or comfortable in the community.
All of that said, I think it's important to say again, per point 1, that I do agree that the issue is much less concerning when it doesn't involve real world contact between people, and that I appreciate you taking the time to reply.