I used AI while writing this, though I have spent 5 - 15 hours on it and I take responsibility for every word and all numbers.
Every time there is a report of sexual harassment within EA there is a lot of introspection. I want to push back on this, not to dismiss the experiences described, which sound genuinely painful, but because I am unsure the evidence supports the belief that EA is uniquely bad here.
So what do we know? In 2022, CEA's Community Health team reported handling around 19 interpersonal harm cases the previous year, ranging from uncomfortable interactions to serious allegations, across a community of thousands. On my read, 3–6 of those 19 clearly involve sexual misconduct across a community of 4,700–10,000 EAs, putting a narrower rate at around 0.03–0.13%.
Alongside this there have been perhaps 3–5 high-profile public cases on the Forum in the last five years. The TIME piece in 2023 cited 7 women, though at the time it was disputed how clearly the cases related to EA. These data don't seem clearly outside of the above range.
The cleanest peer numbers come from universities' Title IX offices, which publish annual case counts. Harvard, Stanford and MIT report disclosure rates of roughly 0.6–2% per year, and formal-investigation rates of around 0.09–0.17%. EA's reported rates sit below university disclosure rates and at-or-below their formal-investigation rates.
A McKinsey workplace survey produces much larger percentages (~1–5% annually, derived from career-lifetime rates of 35% reported in LeanIn/McKinsey 2024). But surveys measure lived experience; CEA's 19 and universities' Title IX figures measure reports filed to a central body. The chart below gives all of these rates with lower and upper bounds.
Full sources and caveats[1].
In contrast to this, many EA forum commenters seem to believe that EA is unusually bad in some general sense[2]. These are examples of comments are widely upvoted and agreed-with. I give them as evidence for a certain widely-agreed belief, but this is not a systematic review:
Funnily enough, I think EA does worse than other communities / movements I'm involved with (grassroots animal advocacy & environmentalism).
Comment (karma 92, agree 54 / disagree 11)
Thank you for speaking up—it takes a lot, especially when women in EA often face such unproductive engagement for doing so
Comment (karma 118, agree 28 / disagree 1)
there is still such a pervasive culture of sexism.
Comment (karma 41, agree 11 / disagree 0)
The EA community has a significant undersupply of information from victims of abusive conduct, since the victims are often branded as 'triggered' or 'irrational'.
Comment (karma 20, agree 14 / disagree 2)
And here are another set implying that broad cultural change is required to fix this:
MY RECOMMENDATIONS
...create systems of checks and balances that do not allow for conflicts of interest to enable biased decisions...
...Create some kind of educational content around how to be a good ally to victims and how to identify bad situations so people can intervene...
...Identify when situations involve biased actors and correct by introducing unbiased actors...
...Hire an external arbiter...
...please work with [J_J]...who has been doing grassroots justice in the Bay Area for some time now.
Comment (karma 47, agree 21 / disagree 7)
I'm a little concerned by the lack of response from org leaders (unless I missed something), and I think there's a risk that CEA leaders and others might under-update from this
Comment on a report of sexual misconduct (karma 46, agree 22 / disagree 3)
Thank you for flagging the aspects of our ecosystem's culture that we need to be extra mindful of.
Comment on a report of sexual misconduct (karma 26, agree 11 / disagree 6)
While writing this piece and rereading many of the comments on such articles I can only recall one widely upvoted comment which pushes against this notion:
Women who identified as EA were less likely report lifetime sexual harassed at work than other women, 18% vs. 20%. They were also less likely to report being sexually harassed outside of work, 57% vs. 61%.
... Overall I am not sure that anything can be concluded from these results either way.
Comment referencing an SSC survey (karma 143, agree 20, disagree 5)
So overall I claim there are lots of widely-upvoted comments that imply EA is unusually bad and few that dispute it.
When anecdotes and data disagree, there is often something wrong with the data[3], but I am confused about what's happening here. By way of example, I went to university in Durham, which after making sexual assault reporting easier, was ranked at or near the top of UK universities for reported sexual assault for the next few years. ie their ranking got considerably worse after they took steps to improve things. Was Durham culture bad in 2011? In my view, yes. Was Durham notably worse than other UK universities? I don't know. How sparse reporting and anecdotes link to the overall picture is a generally difficult problem in sexual misconduct reporting.
As for EA, there are multiple stories that fit the data we see:
- EA is a predominantly male/non-traditional community where women are treated badly and reporting is suppressed.
- Women are treated as well as in other communities, but it should still be an area of focus.
- EA is a transparent culture which is taking this seriously, and things are actually better than in other communities, even if occasionally there are awful occurrences.
So I would like more data. CEA's Community Health team conducted a Gender Experiences Project in 2023 with ~40 interviews and analysis of survey data. I am unable to find any published outputs. There are ways we could distinguish between these hypotheses and try and generate a story where the data and anecdotes are less in conflict.
But until we do, I am not currently convinced by the "EA is unusually bad" hypothesis which many commenters seem to believe. A majority of those who engage with posts about sexual harassment seem to implicitly agree with this hypothesis. I am unconvinced by it. If we imagine a community of thousands of people which was excellent in this area, I still would expect some awful accounts. If I saw this data and these accounts about another community, I think I'd think "they are probably better than most communities".
What's more, we as EAs generally want to communicate accurately about things. If the rate was previously at the lower end of normal bounds (and has probably fallen since), then this community is not abnormally bad, and we should discuss the issue accordingly. And suggested community changes should discuss tradeoffs.
I am not the ideal messenger—I don't consider myself particularly sensitive on these issues. Some will feel this isn't the right moment. I have no interest in litigating specific cases in the comments. But we of all people know the value of scale. Commenters regularly discuss this as if the community is unusually bad, requiring broad cultural change, and those arguments deserve a response.
- ^
Chart notes:
General notes on the ranges. The bars upper and lower bound comes from denominator choice, not numerator uncertainty. For the universities, the lower bound of the denominator counts students-only + academic staff), the high end adds non-academic staff (security, dining, facilities, admin); a much larger denominator that drags the rate down. For the CEA Community Health bars, the range is based on community size estimates. For the two survey-derived bars (US workplace, open-source contributors), the range reflects the conversion from lifetime to annual rate; † on the chart flags these. The EEOC bar has no range because both numerator (charges filed) and denominator (US workforce) are fixed annual figures.
US workplace, women. LeanIn.org and McKinsey & Company, "Women in the Workplace 2024: The 10th Anniversary Report" (full PDF). Derived from lifetime survey responses then turned into an annual rate; not a directly measured annual rate.
Open-source contributors, women. GitHub Open Source Survey, 2017. Derived from lifetime survey responses then turned into an annual rate; not a directly measured annual rate.
Harvard Title IX disclosures and formal investigations (FY20, FY22). Harvard Title IX and Office for Dispute Resolution annual reports: csndr.harvard.edu/data-dashboard; FY22 coverage in The Crimson. Denominator (lower bound: students+ academic staff; upper bound: students + academic staff + non-academic staff).
MIT Title IX disclosures, 2018-19. Title IX & Bias Response annual report, 2018-19 (PDF); current Institute Discrimination and Harassment Response Office; Title IX annual report archive. Denominator from MIT Facts; range follows the same students and academic staff vs students and all staff.
Stanford Title IX disclosures, 2023-24. Stanford SHARE / Title IX annual reports: 2023-24, 2022-23; Stanford Daily coverage of the 2023-24 report. Denominator from Stanford Facts; range as above.
CEA Community Health, all 2021. Julia Wise, "The community health team's work on interpersonal harm in the community", EA Forum, 18 August 2022 (CEA mirror). Range reflects active-vs-engaged community-size estimates (~4,700 to ~10,000), per Todd 2021.
CEA CH sexual harassment subset. Same source as above. The subset count is my own recategorisation of the 19 cases Wise enumerates in that post; there is no separate source.
EEOC sexual harassment charges (US). EEOC, "Sexual Harassment in Our Nation's Workplaces"; EEOC Select Task Force on the Study of Harassment in the Workplace, June 2016. Workforce denominator from the Bureau of Labor Statistics Current Population Survey.
- ^
One might agree that EA is only bad at handling cases or has bad 'vibes', but when finding these comments (and there were many more) they often seem to say EA is bad, and rarely seem to give caveats. My read is that there is a general sense across the topic of sexual harassment that EA is unusually bad and that broad cultural change is needed. I'm not claiming everyone thinks this. If you can find several widely upvoted comments which push against these or provide caveats, let me know.
- ^
"When the data and the anecdotes disagree, the anecdotes are usually right." Jeff Bezos
- ^
I tried to choose comments and posts that were narrowly about the topic such that upvotes were related to this.
(I made an anon account to post this; I'm a longtime EA and Forum user).
The discussion in the comments so far focuses on two claims:
I want to discuss this second point from my perspective, as a woman who's been in EA for some years.
Here's an analogy:
Often, I hear the criticism of EA: 'man, they have bad epistemics and huge problems with groupthink.'
I sort of agree. I can list many instances where I think EAs are driven by groupthink and social incentives in our beliefs, rather than rigorous epistemic standards.
But, I sort of disagree.
That's because I can't think of any community [1] that does better on epistemics and groupthink than EA. Everywhere else I am vaguely involved, the groupthink is way worse, and they have very narrow standards for "acceptable" beliefs. In fact, in most communities, you can't even discuss epistemic standards at all without getting yelled at... (read more)
I was about to write a very similar comment.
Concretely and practically, if the EA environment is unusually predatory, I should warn women I know against applying to jobs in EA or attending EA groups/events, or at least inform them that they would be at risk.
If the EA community is safer then the counterfactual (for which country-level base rates are a reasonable default) then I shouldn't (if only because doing so would put them at more risk.)
So this would be a decision-relevant thing to know about, but as you mention I'm not sure it's tractable to get this information.
One overall thought: I wonder if what you're picking up on isn't an implicit belief that EA is uniquely bad, but the reality that people are very invested in EA. The reactions are strong and strongly worded partly because people in this community want this community to be good. They care about it, many are morally scrupulous, they're invested in its health and ability to function, they know the people in it. I don't think they're implicitly thinking "this is so much worse than anything comparable." My guess is that if you asked directly whether EA is worse than a comparable community, most would say "I'm really not sure" or "probably not? I don't know." That's been my personal experience.
I also think the comparative framing is somewhat beside the point here. EA isn't trying to reduce sexual harassment around the world, but it is strongly trying to community-build, and the relevant question for community-building is whether this is a place people can thrive in. Given that trying to answer the question of whether EA is "better or worse" is somewhat difficult, it's worth asking how important that question really is.
One thing I love about my current organisation is they are incre... (read more)
I like this comment; the events analogy, in particular, shifted some of my beliefs and gave me a useful frame I had overlooked before. Apologies if you've already covered this in other comments.
My impression is that, if asked, many people would say that EA is significantly worse than other spaces. There's some amount of trying to figure out which other spaces are reasonable to compare to, which allows people to agree with some versions and disagree with others, but on a vibes level, I feel like people think EA is significantly worse. [1] Idk if this is useful, but unlike (most?) other commenters, I do think Nathan is responding to a real sentiment.
Re "why do we even care about a baseline?" Ime, when harassment gets brought up (e.g. on the forum), people say that there were basic/common/cheap/expected mitigations that would have prevented the incident. If it turns out that most other orgs/communities, in fact, don't have these measures in place or are similarly bad at mitigating problems, then imo it's harder for proponents of change to argue that "EA" "should"[2] solve the problem. [3]
I liked the events analogy - one reason why I don't care that much about basel... (read more)
Hi,
I appreciate you taking time, I know this subject isn't easy for you. It isn't easy for me either.
I'm really confused by your response. If I ran events, I think hearing baselines would be a thing that would be really important to me. How much people tended to pay, how often they recommended it to friends, what the typical gender balance was and yes, if it was raised, what comparable rates of sexual harassment were.
You know a lot about event organising. What am I missing here? Why would you not want that information? Surely the first step to solving a problem is to understand how bad it is? If EA's rates of sexual harassment are much higher than universities, their approaches will likely work. If they aren't, they likely wont. It seems relevant to me.
Again, you penultimate paragraph confuses me. These are easy an uncontroversial questions (answers from perplexity):
And to continue:
What do you mean only... (read more)
Let me explain. The steel man of your point is: to understand a problem, you need to understand its magnitude. Yes, agree. Again, as per my edit, I was being glib. Let me be more precise.
I'll take my events example. I do want to understand base rates. I want all data, data is great! Let's pretend at most events, 10% of attendees are harassed. At my event, I find out it's 40%. Or, in a different example, it's 0.2%. Both of these are important and significant differences. Now, the base rate becomes quite important to understand and investigate.
Let's say, I find out that at my event, it's 8%. This is more comparable to the case presented in your post. My boss wants me to write an internal document about harassment at events. The first paragraph may include a base rate, for grounding. The internal document will not be titled "our events are not worse than baseline!" and the vast majority of the document will not focus on making this case. Because, what's the point? It would be a waste of my manager's time. I'll write about what problems I suspect are occurring at our events (hopefully I have a good model of this, or can investigate), and I'll talk about potential interventi... (read more)
I've noticed a pattern of a particular rhetorical move you tend to use, whereby you sidestep engaging meaningfully with people's points and instead continue to ask pointed questions. With these questions, it's relatively clear that you have one answer you agree with and expect back. If you don't get that answer, you tend to simply continue posing further questions, sidestepping other points, and pushing in the direction of a specific answer. If this method eventually produces an answer you're looking for, or something close, I then see: "great, now that we've established [narrow thing of x] to be true through my questioning, we can conclude [original claim I've been trying to prove all along]." Sometimes, I've noticed you'll do this even if the person hasn't exactly agreed with narrow thing of x. I think this is unproductive and poor epistemics.
This is how I feel as well, well said.
I think the fact that these issues are more openly discussed in EA than in comparable sectors can skew the discourse. If you don’t regularly attend EA events, it’s easy to think that all of the community health resources suggest an extreme problem with sexual harassment, as opposed to a proactive approach to preventing it. That said, these resources being available can make it more surprising when specific cases are not handled well.
I work in DC. The bar is so low here that it took months of public pressure for one person to see consequences for harassment that led to his staffer committing suicide by lighting herself on fire. In day to day work, it’s normal to get groped by tipsy old men at work events, and dealing with it gracefully is basically part of the job.
This is anecdotal, but something similar happened once at an EA-ish AI policy event (though by a sober, less elderly person). I mentioned it to the organizers in case other people were having issues, and the response was much more helpful and proactive than anything I would have expected in industry.
I would rather have people expect more from this community and be shocked when harassment happens than have people become jaded because other parts of society are willing to put up with worse working conditions.
Happy to hear your thoughts.
I should clarify that I wrote this as someone who left a very EA bubble and came back after working in spaces that were remarkably worse. I agree with other commenters that we should aim to be better than the baseline. Regardless of where we fall on general harassment levels, I appreciate the community’s efforts to address issues as they happen.
Personal anecdote: multiple members of the CEA events team called out a vendor for behavior that I didn't think to report as harassment. They proactively looped in HR and offered to negotiate this person’s exclusion from future event contracts at the venue. I was shocked, given my other recent work experiences.
This response didn't erase the initial interactions, but it made the rest of the event (and future events) so much better. I want everyone to feel like they are working on a team / in a community that cares about them, even if making resources visible causes some people to think we have an outsized problem with harassment.
I disagree with you. In my experience, EA has historically been unusually bad about this. And even though I think your quantitative analysis is poor, for reasons I'll get to, I agree there may be an anecdote/data discrepancy. I think this stems from ambiguity about what counts as sexual harassment within the EA community, which suppresses reporting of potential instances.
Within the EA community, there's historically been ambiguity regarding what counts as appropriate/inappropriate behavior. This ambiguity stems from the fact that EA is both a social and professional community, and it's not obvious what should count as sexual harassment in the context of a community that is both social and professional.
My view on this is that some behaviors that should be considered sexual harassment at an EAG should not be considered sexual harassment at an EAG afterparty. But these lines can be hard to draw. As a result, I think much of the sexual harassment issue within the EA community essentially boils down to: people applying the social rules of engagement to professional contexts, where ... (read more)
I agree that often "EA is unusually bad" isn't grounded in data (often instead in first person accounts, although I'd note that if we assume reporting infrastructure won't capture things well, that's actually where most of the signal lives). I'm pretty skeptical that we should conclude from this data that EA isn't unusually bad.
Others have made similar points but just at a high level, my concerns when comparing to the other data (e.g. Title IX) would be that we are biasing both the numerator and denominator of the reporting rate in a way that biases us to think we are doing better than we are.
- Numerator: There are lots of different reporting mechanisms and places and so we shouldn't expect CEA CH to capture all the cases as it is one of many parallel endpoints. Something like Title IX sits at the end of a mandatory reporting funnel. If I tell my RA that my professor harassed me, they are mandatory reporters of that. The same isn't true for if I tell someone at org X that someone at org Y harassed me (it is true within a single workplace but because EA is quite fractured, this isn't a mandatory reporting funnel to CEA CH).
- Denominator: For a great deal of "EAs" what this
... (read more)One thing I'll add which I haven't seen in the comments is some of the vibe of 'EA is unusally bad' is that EA is probably unusually bad in some ways due to the makeup and culture of our community, and less bad in others. Bluntly I think much of this comes down to things like being worse at reading social cues, a high male to female ratio, and a community that is an unusual mix of professional and social network.
I get the impression from female friends that being in EA means tolerating, for example, a lot more being hit on in unprofessional situations (e.g. EAG) down to creepier contexts, with the men missing being rebuffed multiple times.
This doesn't discount your main argument Nathan, but to the extent that people complain about EA being worse, this might be what they're pointing at some of the time.
I also agree with others' comments that a lot of this conversation is about how EA is 'bad' rather than 'worse', and that as community builders we want to do better, even if we're already above average.
It is extremely difficult to determine base rates for something like sexual harassment, because it's an offence that allows for ambiguity and plausible deniability, because there's room for retaliation, etc, and it will strongly depend on how much people trust the bodies they are reporting to.
What we can do is look at the responses to the incidents that do get raised, and the experiences of victims, and judge whether or not they live up to the standards we want to see in a group that takes sexual harrasment seriously. I do not think the grades are very good on this front.
Only 3 months ago we had a writeup detailing a shockingly terrible response to sexual harrassment by one of the most prominent EA orgs out there. The response is far worse than anything I've ever seen at any organisation I've ever been in. This indicates to me that the environment is nowhere the high standards that should be aimed for.
Regardless of the actual base rates, the question that matters the most is whether there is room for improvement, and I think it's blindingly obvious that the answer is yes.
There is the wider community, and then there is the professional ecosystem. I would put forward the following: at the point where you are reading a detailed account of sexual harassment supported by two independent investigations and a settlement, it is very easy to write a supportive comment. Especially for those with approximately nothing to lose by offering support. The real test isn't "when presented with a publicly documented case that has strong evidence, can you say something nice?" It's "within the professional ecosystem, if instances of potential or substantiated sexual harassment occur in your own organisation, can you respond appropriately." The second is much harder, but it is also the thing that actually matters for the health of the community. And then we can try to extend this to wider community-building (what happens within your city group? What happens at your events?), these things also matter a lot, but it can really vary by location, group, time, etc.
I hope this doesn't come across as ungrateful! I'm eternally thankful for the kind words I received, and those words did help me a lot. But the thing that would have helped much more was if the incident had been han... (read more)
Is it possible that subgroups within EA have sexual harrassment rates that are significantly above or below baseline? For example, maybe AI related spaces or SF Bay Area spaces have higher levels of sexual harrassment. Then people who are generally in those spaces would subjectively observe that the level of sexual harrassment is high, even though it might not be if you were to average across all of EA.
If there are parts of EA that have lower than average levels of sexual harrassment, I would not expect anyone to speak up and say, "man, this animal welfare community sure doesn't have much sexual harrassment". So there is a bias in terms of who is moved to share their experience.
Thanks for writing, Nathan! I think there are two separate arguments: one says that EA is doing worse than baseline, and the other is that EA is doing worse than our shared -- sometimes implicit -- community standards. It's fair to ask people to chart their expectations against baseline for almost anything, but it's also fair to establish community norms above baseline. Some of the comments you quoted (inc. one of mine) are critiques relying on the higher standard.
While I intend to discuss this with Pete directly, my general objection is that commenters don't discuss this as if EA is seeking to have a much higher bar and failing. They mostly discuss it as if EA is unusually bad.
If there is general agreement that EA has a much higher bar I would expect to see widely upvoted comments saying how much better EA is than comparable spaces even as it still has work to do. I don't see that.
One of my comments is cited in the section about there being a wide belief in the EA community, so I can provide my personal perspective, as well as comment more broadly.
While other people have already pointed out that your comparison chart has methodological issues, which I agree with, I don't think this is a crux. While I think communities and spaces can never reach a state where there are no bad actors, or where no one does or experiences harm — I very much don't think this means harm is okay (which I'm sure you agree with), or that our response to harassment might somehow matter less if it turned out our community did better than 'baseline'. I was personally very disappointed by how CEA handled the recent harassment case, and my issue isn't that I think CEA should somehow have created a work environment where nothing bad ever occurred, or that CEA has more HR violations than baseline, but instead that it should have — bare minimum — taken reasonable steps to prevent the harassment, as required by UK law. In this case the number of incidents isn't the issue, it was how the specific incident was handled.
Regardless, I think sexism isn't something that ends at, or is only a problem... (read more)
To clear up a few general points.
On missing moods. I agree this is horrible. As I've said, I don't think I'm the best person to say this. But if an issue is important, I think it's important to discuss accurately. I wish I were a more gracious, more empathetic, more concise, communicator.
Methodology:
- John Salter originally claimed the numbers were perhaps 300x off. After discussion (if I understand correctly) he thinks it's more like 2-20x
- Liv Gorton thinks the denominator may be too low and the numerator too large, though I don't currently know
... (read more)If I understand correctly, your question is whether EA is specifically worse than other organisations, rather than whether being on a par with other organisations is also very bad in this regard?
Because I get the impression that some people simply say that EA is bad, but don’t necessarily rule out the possibility that others are bad too.
I reckon it might be important to know whether the EA is actually performing worse, so the question does seem important to me, because one of the possible answers would be significant.
(For example, learning more from ... (read more)
I'm not really convinced by your evidence that there's a widespread belief that EA is worse than other communities. Your first quote clearly says this, I grant. The other quotes seem to me to all be saying something more like "this community has this problem", and "I wish this community was better / had hoped that it would be better", without saying "we are worse than relevant comparisons", much less "we are worse than relevant comparisons because of intrinsic aspects of our culture".
FWIW, my belief, and I'm sure I'm not the only one, is more like: EA hand... (read more)
I think you're reading some of them right, and many of them wrong, because you seem to continue to be equating "EA's performance on this issue makes me sad" and "EA's performance on this issue is worse than peers". Some people believe both for sure! But you keep including people saying the first thing as if they're saying the second. "Currently about half of the comments disagreeing here seem to espouse the view that the community is bad." -- again not distinguishing between "bad" and "worse".
Honestly my guess would be that most people don't have a clear considered belief on the comparison. They see bad behaviour and they object. It's not obvious to me why they would feel the need for a belief on the comparison. Whatever it is, the bad behaviour is still objectionable.
I hear you as pushing in a direction of "maybe we can't do anything about it, because no-one around us has succeeded in doing better". And, well, maybe! But I think this is a weak heuristic as compared with thinking directly about whether we should have stronger codes of conduct at EA conferences, or whether we need to develop more training resources or other support for orgs that are too small to have a proper HR function, or what stopped CEA from acting on what seems like clear evidence of inappropriate behaviour.
You quote me in this reply and so to clarify, I do think you're misunderstanding my comment. I don't know whether or not EA is uniquely bad. I can speak to my personal experience on this but as I say in the comment, I think there are lots of reasons as to why determining this is really difficult. My comment was intended to point out the issues I have with the approach in the post, not to make a positive case for EA being bad.
Basically, "we shouldn't conclude from this data that X isn't Y" isn't a claim for "X is Y."
Thanks for questioning the common narrative even though it's awkward! I think it's great you delayed until things got less heated.
I think one big question is whether you'd also need to consider all the complaints made to all the HR departments in EA and not just CEA's CH team. I imagine you're only going to CH if it's someone from some workplace besides your own, and that you'd go to your manager / HR team if it was someone you actually work with. If that's right, you might also need to talk to the people who run groups / coworking spaces. &nbs... (read more)
I think this is a great point directionally, but hard to make the maths work for the numbers you've suggested.
Like, for there to be 100x more incidents of interpersonal misconduct than are reported to CH... well, there'd need to be 1000s of incidents! And there are only a few thousand EAs. It could be that the rate is in the tens of percent, but I'd find that surprising.
Ditto your adjustment for women: to get a 3x adjustment given the amount of women in other spaces:
One tension I grapple with in these conversations that I'm struggling to articulate is the difficulty between separating out the fact that bad things tend to be so much worse when you experience them, so that if the data isn't that damning, as I man, I can feel good about EA and continue with my day. Whereas I imagine for women who bear the brunt of it, EA being not that bad is still pretty shitty, and if I knew this viscerally, I would be a whole lot more empathetic and do a lot more to try and combat it.
Maybe the point I'm trying to make is when en... (read more)
In short, often yes.
The acceptable baseline amount of sexual harassment in a community that is otherwise steadfastly committed to rejecting the status quo and improving the state of the world, is zero. We are not comparing ourselves to the average workplace or university.