EA - Bridging EA's Gender Gap: Input From 60 People by Alexandra Bos

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Bridging EA's Gender Gap: Input From 60 People, published by Alexandra Bos on April 30, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.TLDRWe hosted a session at EAGxRotterdam during which 60 participants discussed potential reasons why there are fewer women in EA and how this could be improved. The main categories of solutions people came up with were (1) adjusting outreach strategies, (2) putting women in more visible positions, (3) making EA’s atmosphere more female-friendly, (4) pursuing strategies to empower women in EA, and (5) adjusting certain attributes of EA thought. The goal of this post is to facilitate a solution-oriented discussion within the EA community so we can make tangible progress on its currently skewed gender ratio and underlying problems.Some notes before we start:Whether gender diversity is something to strive for is beyond this discussion. We will simply assume that it is and go from there. You could for example check out these posts (1, 2, 3) for a discussion on (gender) diversity if you want to read about this or discuss it.To keep the scope of this post and the session we hosted manageable, we focused on women specifically. However, we do not claim gender is binary and acknowledge that to increase diversity there are many more groups to focus on than just women (such as POC or other minorities).The views we describe in this post don’t necessarily correspond with our (Veerle Bakker's & Alexandra Bos') own but rather we are describing others’ input.Please view this post as crowdsourcing hypotheses from community members as a starting point for further discussion rather than as presenting The Hard Truth. You can also view posts such as these (1, 2, 3) for additional views on EA’s gender gap.EA & Its Gender GapIt is no secret that more men than women are involved with the EA community currently. In the last EA survey (2020), only 26.9% of respondents identified as female. This is similar to the 2019 survey.Graph source: EA Survey 2020.The goal of this post is to get a solution-oriented discussion started within the wider EA community to take steps towards tangible change. We aim to do this by sharing the insights from a discussion session at EAGxRotterdam in November 2022 titled "Discussion: how to engage more women with EA". In this post, we will be going through the different problems the EAGx’ers suspected may underlie the gender gap. Each problem will be paired with the potential solutions they proposed.MethodologyThis post summarises and categorises the insights from group discussions from a workshop at EAGxRotterdam. Around 60 people attended this session, approximately 40 of whom were women. In groups of 5, participants brainstormed on both 1) what may be the reasons for the relatively low number of women in EA (focusing on the causes, 15 mins), and 2) in what ways the EA community could attract more women to balance this out (focusing on solutions, 15 mins). The discussions were based on these prompts. We asked the groups to take notes on paper during their discussions so that this could be turned into this forum post. We informed them of this in advance. If you want to take a deep dive and look at the source materials, you are welcome to take a look at the participants’ written discussion notes.LimitationsThis project has some considerable limitations. First of all, the groups’ ideas are based on short brainstorming sessions, so they are not substantiated with research or confirmed in other ways. It is also worth mentioning that not all attendees had a lot of experience with the EA community - some only knew about EA for a couple of weeks or months. Furthermore, a considerable amount of information may have gotten lost in translation because it was transferred through hasty discussion notes. Additionally, the information was the...