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."
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 means is just engaging online and donating to GiveWell. The Title IX denominator is people who are co-located on the same campus. The exposure-per-person is likely wildly different to other contexts.
I basically think errors here aren't random so your number here is a reasonable lower bound but I'm not sure it provides insight into the overall rate.
(This isn't attempting to reply to your comment in its entirety, just a few scattered thoughts in response.)
I think one can separate Frances' concern into two issues:
The initial failure from her point of view to handle this appropriately, i.e., people read it and didn't flag it as harassment and deal with it at that stage.
The secondary failure to handle it after she found out and felt hurt.
I think the idea that she has uniquely mischaracterised this document and subsequent failings seems to rely on it being true that the independent investigations are also similarly not representing things properly?
We can totally discard almost everything written in her post and it would still seem pretty obviously true that there was something deemed to be sexual harassment and an indentified failing to handle that appropriately. I think that is a pretty significant failure. I don't know what level of failure to handle sexual harassment is typical ("within the range of mistakes real organizations make"). Given EA's goals, I'd argue it's okay to hold them to a high standard. I haven't seen anyone is calling for CEA or any specific individual to be punished unusually. It's important stories like this get shared publicly so that we can improve, and part of improvement does mean actually acknowledging mistakes properly.
An important flag too in my view is that I don't think a document being written that was messy and poorly communicated is the issue in and of itself. I believe we should endorse people writing documents in a way that feels authentic to them and then it being on their manager for them to help communicate what they're trying to say in the most productive way (I've had a previous manager describe part of their job as helping me take any issues I have in the raw, most honest form, and then turn them into more useful comments).
There's nuance in all situations but I find that sometimes in EA we seek out nuance in ways that doesn't actually always guide us towards improving as a community and instead can just make it very hard for people to voice problems. Of course, it is really important to think critically but that doesn't actually have to be in the comments of a post like this.
Others have touched on why this response feels unsatisfying, but on a meta level, I'm not sure responding in this level of detail was the right call. The additional context doesn't really contradict Frances's account and it mostly reframes things in ways that, intentionally or not, read as defensive. If CEA genuinely accepts that it made serious mistakes, I think the stronger move would have been a shorter, clearer apology without any explanatory scaffolding.
I also really hope Frances was informed that this response would be posted and, ideally, shown the specific contents beforehand. Based on her reply, that doesn't appear to be the case. Publishing a detailed public explanation of your side of someone's account of being sexually harassed at your organisation without any notification seems like a pretty significant misstep on its own.
Thank you for speaking up—it takes a lot, especially when women in EA often face such unproductive engagement for doing so. I'm sorry for what you've been through.
There are so many of us who see the issues you're pointing at and want the community to properly reckon with this. As you say, despite what many believe, victims are often not rallied behind and are too often met with a wave of excuses made for their perpetrator.
I have so much I could say, but for now, you have so much support behind you, and I deeply hope this can be a step towards a safer EA 🩷🩷
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."
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.
I basically think errors here aren't random so your number here is a reasonable lower bound but I'm not sure it provides insight into the overall rate.
(This isn't attempting to reply to your comment in its entirety, just a few scattered thoughts in response.)
I think one can separate Frances' concern into two issues:
I think the idea that she has uniquely mischaracterised this document and subsequent failings seems to rely on it being true that the independent investigations are also similarly not representing things properly?
We can totally discard almost everything written in her post and it would still seem pretty obviously true that there was something deemed to be sexual harassment and an indentified failing to handle that appropriately. I think that is a pretty significant failure. I don't know what level of failure to handle sexual harassment is typical ("within the range of mistakes real organizations make"). Given EA's goals, I'd argue it's okay to hold them to a high standard. I haven't seen anyone is calling for CEA or any specific individual to be punished unusually. It's important stories like this get shared publicly so that we can improve, and part of improvement does mean actually acknowledging mistakes properly.
An important flag too in my view is that I don't think a document being written that was messy and poorly communicated is the issue in and of itself. I believe we should endorse people writing documents in a way that feels authentic to them and then it being on their manager for them to help communicate what they're trying to say in the most productive way (I've had a previous manager describe part of their job as helping me take any issues I have in the raw, most honest form, and then turn them into more useful comments).
There's nuance in all situations but I find that sometimes in EA we seek out nuance in ways that doesn't actually always guide us towards improving as a community and instead can just make it very hard for people to voice problems. Of course, it is really important to think critically but that doesn't actually have to be in the comments of a post like this.
Others have touched on why this response feels unsatisfying, but on a meta level, I'm not sure responding in this level of detail was the right call. The additional context doesn't really contradict Frances's account and it mostly reframes things in ways that, intentionally or not, read as defensive. If CEA genuinely accepts that it made serious mistakes, I think the stronger move would have been a shorter, clearer apology without any explanatory scaffolding.
I also really hope Frances was informed that this response would be posted and, ideally, shown the specific contents beforehand. Based on her reply, that doesn't appear to be the case. Publishing a detailed public explanation of your side of someone's account of being sexually harassed at your organisation without any notification seems like a pretty significant misstep on its own.
Thank you for speaking up—it takes a lot, especially when women in EA often face such unproductive engagement for doing so. I'm sorry for what you've been through.
There are so many of us who see the issues you're pointing at and want the community to properly reckon with this. As you say, despite what many believe, victims are often not rallied behind and are too often met with a wave of excuses made for their perpetrator.
I have so much I could say, but for now, you have so much support behind you, and I deeply hope this can be a step towards a safer EA 🩷🩷