I’m Catherine from CEA’s Community Health and Special Projects Team.
I’ve been frustrated and angered by some of the experiences some women and gender minorities have had in this community, ranging from feeling uncomfortable being in an extreme minority at a meeting through to sexual harassment and much worse. And I’ve been saddened by the lost impact that resulted from these experiences. I’ve tried to make things a bit better (including via co-founding Magnify Mentoring before I started at CEA), and I hope to do more this year.
In December 2022, after a couple of very sad posts by women on the EA Forum, Anu Oak and I started working on a project to get a better understanding of the experiences of women and gender minorities in the EA community. Łukasz Grabowski is now also helping out. Hopefully this information will help us form effective strategies to improve the EA movement.
I don’t really know what we’re going to find, and I’m very uncertain about what actions we’ll want to take at the end of this. We’re open to the possibility that things are really bad and that improving the experiences of women and gender minorities should be a major priority for our team. But we’re also open to finding out that things aren’t – on the whole – all that bad, or aren’t all that tractable, and there are no significant changes we want to prioritise.
We are still in the early stages of our project. The things we are doing now are:
- Gathering together and analysing existing data (EA Survey data, EAG(x) event feedback forms, incoming reports to the Community Health team, data from EA community subgroups, etc).
- Talking to others in the community who are running related projects, or who have relevant expertise.
- Planning our next steps.
If you have existing data you think would be helpful and that you’d like to share please get in touch by emailing Anu on anubhuti.oak@centreforeffectivealtruism.org.
If you’re running a related project, feel free to get in touch if you’d like to explore coordinating in some way (but please don’t feel obligated to).
I'm happy to see the community health team analyze existing data. Will any of this be shared with the rest of the EA community in any way, e.g. after deanonymizing?
I'd also love to see the community health team eventually address some of the most severe allegations that have surfaced recently, specifically this thread and its unresolved questions. While I'm happy to see Julia say she's taking a "renewed look at possible steps to take here", how this comes across is that the renewed look was in response to the case going public. If true, this does raise questions around whether similar cases (egregious and unambiguous abuse of power by senior EAs) were known to the community health team and how they were handled, and whether a similar renewed look might be warranted for these other cases, even if they haven't been made public or caused any other issues yet.
In general my impression is that while most are very grateful for the community health team's work, and happy to place their trust accordingly, the current model does require mainly taking the community health team's word at face value. However, recent events have indicated that this dependence may not be the most sustainable or accountable model going forwards. This is true also from the community health team's perspective, in terms of being easier to lose the community's trust if individual team members make human errors, as well as being more susceptible to allegations that may suffer from missing information.
current working model is the community health team seems good at what they do once they talk to people face to face (source: mostly word of mouth, people might have other experiences), some members are maybe temperamentally somewhat conflict averse and in general they are used to ~rat culture levels of charitability when it comes to public communications
regrettably this means that people who are less temperamentally charitable/newer to the movement might find it more difficult to trust them.
seems important to distinguish 'are people happy with the results of talking to them/are they worthy of trust' to 'are they good at comms'