We could definitely do well to include more people in the movement. For what it's worth, though, EA's core cause areas could be considered among the most important and neglected social justice issues. The global poor, non-human animals, and future generations are all spectacularly neglected by mainstream society, but we (among others) have opted to help them.

You might be interested in the following essays:

• EA and tackling racism
• Is Charity About Helping the Poorest?
• Ajeya Cotra's intro to EA talk starting at 25:45, where she talks about expanding the moral circle to include all humans, all sentient beings, and future generations

Taking the question literally, searching the term ‘social justice’ in EA forum reveals only 12 mentions, six within blog posts, and six comments, one full blog post supports it, three items even question its value, the remainder being neutral or unclear on value.

That can't be right. I think what may have happened is that when you do a search, the results page initially shows you only 6 each of posts and comments, and you have to click on "next" to see the rest. If I keep clicking next until I get to the last pages of posts and comments, I can count 86 blog posts and 158 comments that mention "social justice", as of now.

BTW I find it interesting that you used the phrase "even question its value", since "even" is "used to emphasize something surprising or extreme". I would consider questioning the values of things to be pretty much the core of the EA philosophy...

FWIW, I'm not sure if you found it already, but I think this is the best piece I've seen written so far on the overlaps and differences between EA and SJ worldviews: What Makes Outreach to Progressives Hard

Taking the question literally, searching the term ‘social justice’ in EA forum reveals only 12 mentions, six within blog posts, and six comments...

I worry EA is another exclusive, powerful, elite community, which has somehow neglected diversity.

I think it's worth distinguishing discussions of "social justice" from discussions of "diversity." Diversity in EA has been much discussed, and there is also a whole facebook group dedicated to it. There has been less discussion of "social justice" in those terms, partly, I suspect, because it's not natural for utilitarians to describe things in terms of "justice", and partly because, as mentioned, the phrase "social justice" has acquired specific connotations. However, there has been extensive discussion of broader social justice related critiques of EA, largely under the banner of "systemic change."

Note: we also track demographic diversity in the ~ annual EA Survey.

I think you raise important questions on a complex topic. Regarding the dearth of the literal phrase 'social justice', I think this is probably an effect of two things: 
1) an actual de-emphasis on the concept, either intentionally or by a larger relative focus on other ethical frameworks. My unfounded guess would be that there'd be a minority of people who would want to whole-heartedly reject social justice-related talk, a larger group who are open to it but consider it not as important as other ethical concepts to EA, and a minority of people who think it should be the dominant ethical concept. 

and 

2) an avoidance of the literal term 'social justice' because of its connotations in the 'culture wars', politics, etc. I think a lot of EA thought deals with the substance of social justice - examples might be the neartermist focus on low and middle-income countries, work on U.S. criminal justice reform,  the international justice angle on climate change, or even the intergenerational justice angle on longtermism. This work is grappling with justice-related issues implicitly, but isn't usually conceptualised or written out in terms of social justice. Whether it can or should be or not I don't know. 

One early piece on this topic was The Privilege of Earning to Give.

I have seen much written about how EA considers itself merit-based, however, to be recognized for epistemic merit, one would need to have at least a post-secondary education to achieve a reputable job. Most EA leaders seem to have at minimum graduate degrees, if not tenured professorships. 

One of the highest status EA leaders of all time is literally a high school dropout.

Flipping the question around, we might also ask "where is the EA in social justice"? What has the social justice movement done to prioritize their efforts, to focus on cost-effectiveness, to ask how they can do the most good?

I think lack of diversity in EA is largely due to founder effects, and EA is working on this. There's an emerging effort to have EA outreach in more global south countries like India, the Philippines, and Mexico, and local EA community-builders are working hard on that.

For what it's worth, it seems to me that EA university groups have more racial and gender diversity than the broader EA movement, which I think is because they reach a broader base of people, compared to the type of people who randomly stumble across EA on the internet.

The EA community is exclusive by level of education. I have seen much written about how EA considers itself merit-based, however, to be recognized for epistemic merit, one would need to have at least a post-secondary education to achieve a reputable job.

I'm not sure I agree. I think many EA orgs are anti-credentialist enough that you wouldn't need any university education if you have the skills, which could be built through, e.g., doing independent work funded by the Long-Term Future Fund. Actually, I think dropping out of college to do EA work is even more badass. Compared to academia, a good number of AI alignment researchers don't have graduate degrees, though it is true that many EA leaders have graduate degrees.

I think your assessment of the lack of diversity in EA is right, that this is a problem (we're missing out on talented people, coalition allies, specific knowledge, new ideas, wider perspectives, etc), and that we need to working towards improving this situation. On all three (questions 1-3), see this  statement from CEA. Thanks for raising this!

In terms of what we can be doing, being inclusive in hiring and pipeline-building seem very important - Open Philanthropy are amongst the best practice on this (see here) and Magnify Mentoring are doing awesome work.

Empowering marginalised/affected communities directly and working closely with them is one of the reasons GiveDirectly is great and is strongly supported by the EA community. This can't work so clearly with farmed animals and future people, of course.

Just to add to other links people have offered, I've always liked this on privilege,  and this discussion: 

I agree with you that EA outreach to non-Western cultures is an important and probably neglected area — thank you for pointing that out! 

There are lots of reasons to make EA more geographically (and otherwise) diverse, and also some things to be careful about, given that different cultures tend to have different ethical standards and discussion norms. See this article about translation of EA into Mandarin. Something to observe is that outreach is very language and culture-specific. I generally think that international outreach is best done in a granular manner — not just “outreach to all non-Western cultures” or “outreach to all the underprivileged”. So I think it would be wonderful for someone to post about how to best approach outreach in Malawi, but that the content might be extremely different from writing about outreach in Nigeria. 

So: if you're interested in questions like this, I think it would be great if someone were to choose a more specific question and research it! (And I appreciate that your post points out a real gap.)

On a different note, I think that the discussion around your post would be more productive if you used other terms than “social justice.” Similarly, I think that the dearth of the phrase “social justice” on the EA Forum is not necessarily a sign of a lack of desire for equity and honesty. There are many things about the “social justice” movement that EAs have become wary of. For instance, my sense is that the conventional paradigm of the contemporary Western elite is largely based on false or unfalsifiable premises. I’d guess that this makes EAs suspicious when they hear “social justice” — just like they’re often wary about certain types of sociology research (things like “grit,” etc. which don’t replicate) or psychosexual dynamics and other bits of Freud’s now-debunked research.  

At the same time (just like with Freudism), a lot of the core observations that the modern social justice paradigm makes are extremely true and extremely useful. It is profoundly obvious, both from statistics and from the anecdotal evidence of any woman that pretty much every mixed-gender workplace has an unacceptable amount of harassment. There is abundant evidence that e.g. non-white Americans experience some level of racism, or at least are treated differently, in many situations. 

Given this, here are some things that I think it would be useful to do:

1. Make the experience of minorities within EA more comfortable and safe.
2. Continue seriously investigating translating EA concepts to other cultural paradigms (or conversely, translating useful ideas from other cultural paradigms into EA). (See also this article .)
3. Take some of the more concrete/actionable pieces of the social justice paradigm and analyze/ harmonize them with the more consequentialist/science-based EA philosophy (with the understanding that an honest analysis sometimes finds cherished ideas to be false).

I think the last item is definitely worth engaging with more, especially with people who understand and value the social justice paradigm. Props if you can make progress on this!

A very nitpicky comment, but maybe it does point towards something about something: "What if every person in low-income countries were cash-transferred one years’ wage?"

There is a lot of money in the EA space, but at most 5 percent of the sort of money that would be required for doing that (quick google of 'how many people live in low income countries' tells me there are 700 million people in countries with a per capita income below roughly 1000 usd a year, so your suggestion would have a 700 billion dollar bill. No individual, including Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos has more than a quarter of that amount of money, and while very rich, the big EA funders are no where near that rich). Also, of course, give directly is actually giving people in low income countries the equivalent of a year's wage to let them figure out what they want to do with the money. Of course they are operating on a small enough scale that is affordable within the funding constraints of the community.

I don't know, the on-topic thing that I would maybe say is that it is important to have a variety of people working in the community, people with a range of skills and experiences (ie we want to have some people who have an intuitive feel for big economic numbers and how they relate to each other -- but it is not at all important for everyone, or even most people to have that awareness). But at the same time, not everyone is in a place to be part of the analytic research oriented part of the EA community, and I simply don't think that decision making will become better at achieving the values I care about if the decision making process is spread out.

(But of course the counter point is that decision makers who ignore the voices of the people they are claiming to help often do more harm than good, and usually are maximizing something they care about, which is true).

Also, and I'm not sure how relevant this is, but I think it is likely that part of the reason why X-risks is the area of the community that is closest to being fully funded is because it is the cause area that people can care about for purely selfish reasons -- ie spending enough on X-risk reduction is more of a coordination problem than an altruism problem.

1) Am I wrong in my stereotype of the average EA?

Probably not. EA pulls from philosophy, computer science, economics, etc, which are themselves disproportionately white and male.

2) Is my interest in greater diversity within EA misguided?

No, it warrants some attention; the question is how much relative to directly working on EA causes.

3) If I am right about the lack of diversity in EA, is it something the EA community is working towards improving? [...]  Bright Malawian girls would achieve the same merit if provided with the same privilege.

Yes, see links from the other commenters. As for getting Malawian girls to the forefront of EA, that's a long-term process that will take decades as their society develops (eg. high school completion is 10x lower than in the US). We live in a deeply unfair point in history.

4) If diversity should be increased, how can it be accomplished?

One approach here.

This post calls out un-diversities in EA. Instead of attributable to EA doing something wrong, I find these patterns mainly underline a basic fact about what type of people EA tends to attract. So I don't find the post fair to EA and its structure in a very general way.

I find to detect in the article an implicit, underlying view of the EA story being something like:

                'Person becoming EA -> World giving that person EA privileges'

But imho, this completely turns upside down the real story, which I mostly see as:

                'Privileged person ->becoming EA -> trying to put their resources/privileges to good use, e.g. to help the most underprivileged in the world',

whereby privileged refers to the often a bit geeky, intellectual-ish, well-off person we often find particularly attracted to EA.

In light of this story, the fact that white dudes are over-represented relative to the overall global world population, in EA organizations, would be difficult to avoid in today's world, a bit like it would be difficult to avoid a concentration of high-testosterone males in a soccer league.

Of course, this does not deny that many biases exist everywhere in the selection process for higher ranks within EA, and these may be a true problem. Call them out specifically, and we have a starting point to work from. Also in EA, people tend to abuse of power, and this is not easy to prevent. Again, welcome to all enlightenment about how, specifically, to improve on this. Finally, that skin color is associated with privileges worldwide may be a huge issue in itself, but I'd not reproach this specifically to 'EA' itself. Certainly, EAs should also be interested in this topic, if they find cost-effective measures to address it (although, to some degree, these potential measures have tough competition, just because there is so much poverty and inequality in the world, absorbing a good part of EA's focus for not only bad reasons).

Examples of what I mean (I add the emphasize):

However, the more I learn about the people of EA, the more I worry EA is another exclusive, powerful, elite community, which has somehow neglected diversity. The face of EA appears from the outside to be a collection of privileged, highly educated, primarily young, white men.

Let's talk once you have useful info on whether they focus on the wrong things, rather than that they have the wrong skin colors. In my model, and in my observations, there is simply a bias in who feels attracted to EA, and as much as anyone here would love the average human to care about EA, it is sadly not the case (although in my experience, it is mostly true that more generally slightly geeky, young, logical, possibly well-off persons like and join EA, and can and want to use resources towards it, than simply the "white men" you mention).

The EA organizations now manage billions of dollars, but the decisions, as far as I can tell, are made by only a handful of people. Money is power, and although the decisions might be carefully considered to doing the most good, it is acutely unfair this kind of power is held by an elite few. How can it be better distributed? What if every person in low-income countries were cash-transferred one years’ wage?

The link between the last bold part and the preceding bold parts surprises me. I see two possible readings:

a. 'The rich few elite EAs get the money, but instead we should take that money to support the poorest?' That would have to be answered by: These handful work with many many EAs or other careful employees, to try to figure out what causes to prioritize based on decent cost-benefit analysis, and they don't use this money for themselves (and indeed, at times, it seems like cash-transfers to the poorest show up among promising candidates for funding, but these still compete with other ways to try to help the poorest beings or those most at risk in the future).

b. 'Give all poorest some money, so some of these could become some of the "handful of people" with the power (to decide on the EA budget allocation)'. I don't know. Seems a bit a distorted view on the most pressing reason for alleviating the most severe poverty in the world.

While it might be easy to envy some famous persons in our domain, none has chosen 'oh, whom could we give a big privilege of running the EA show', but instead there is a process, however imperfect, trying to select some of the people who seem most effective for also the higher rank EA positions. And as many skills useful for it correlate with privileged education, I'd not necessarily want to force more randomization or anything - other than through compelling, specific ways to avoid biases.

I would love to see us scale up the number of EA hotels. I don't just think this would be highly impactful, but I also suspect that this would much it much easier for people who aren't as financially privileged to break into the movement and it may also reduce some of the impact of credentialism. A natural result of this would be to benefit minorities who tend to be lower SES.