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.
[ETA: Whoops, realized this is answering a different question than the one the poster actually asked -- they wanted to know what individual community members can do, which I don't address here.]
Some concrete suggestions:
-Mandatory trainings for community organizers. This idea is lifted directly from academia, which often mandates trainings of this sort. The professional versions are often quite dumb and involve really annoying unskippable videos; I think a non-dumb EA version would encourage the community organizer to read the content of the community health guide linked in the above post and then require them to pass a quiz about its contents (but if they can pass the quiz without reading the guide that's fine, the point is to check they understand the contents of the guide, not to make them read it). I imagine that better but higher-effort/more costly versions of this test would involve short answer questions ("How would you respond to X situation?"); less useful but lower-effort versions would involve multiple choice questions. To elaborate, the short answers version forces people to think more about their answer but also probably requires a team of people to read all these answers and check if they're appropriate or not, which is costly.
-some institution (the community health team? I dunno) should come up with and institute codes of conduct for EA events and make sure organizers know about them. There'd presumably need to be multiple codes of conduct for different types of events. This ties in to the previous bullet since it's the sort of thing you'd want to make sure organizers understand. This is a bit of a vague and uninformed proposal -- maybe something like this already exists, although if so I don't know about it, which at minimum implies that if it exists it ought to be more widely advertised.
-maybe a centralized page of resources for victims and allies, with advice, separate from the code of conduct? Don't know how useful this is
-every medium/large EA event/group should have a designated community health point person, preferably female though not necessarily, who makes a public announcement that if someone makes you uncomfortable you can talk to the point person and with your permission they'll do what's necessary to help, and then follows through if people do report issues to them. They should also remind/inform everyone of the role of Julia Wise, and, if someone comes to them with an issue and gives permission to pass it on to her and her team, do that. (You might ask, if this point person is probably just gonna pass things on to Julia Wise, why even have a point person? The answer is that reporting is scary and it can be easier to report to someone you know who has some context on the situation/group.)
Furthermore, making these things happen has to explicitly be someone's job, or the job of a group of someones. It's much likelier to actually happen in practice if it is someone's specific responsibility than if it's just an idea some people talk about on the Forum.
Something I don't think helps much is: trying to tell all EAs that they should improve their behavior and stop being terrible. This won't work because unfortunately, self-identifying EAs aren't all cooperative nice individuals who care about not harming others personally. They don't have incentives to change just because someone tells them to, and worse offenders on these sorts of issues are also very likely to not be the sorts of people who want to read posts like this one about how to do better. That said, I think that posts on this subject that are more helpful are posts that include lots of specific examples or advice, especially advice for bystanders.
- Training seems to me like a good idea, if it can be online (to a large group - e.g. all organizers) very specific, so as you mentioned: if this situation occurs -> do this (e.g. if a person reports mistreatment of this sort, we do XYZ), free, and mandatory, it could be very helpful.
- The centralized page or e.g., an add-on/button in Swapcard.
- It should be announced in the intro speech who these designated people are (it should be 1 male and 1 female member), and I saw a great idea in EAGxPrague, where they put the photos and contact details to
... (read more)