On sexism in the effective altruism community

Two reflections

I’m an effective altruist through and through. I am so grateful to have found the idea, to work in this space. I love the community, love my job. I think EA is an important player in philanthropy and in trying to improve the world. To quote my EA Global opening spiel:

I think effective altruism remains relevant because it’s not just a philosophy—it’s an actionable framework, embodied by a community that’s deeply committed to living it.

And it’s an exceptional community in many ways.

Okay, with that out of the way, here is the “but” that you can tell I’m working up to. Sometimes, I get asked about my experience as a woman in EA. And it’s something I’ve thought about a lot.

I’ve been in EA since 2019. My experience has been varied and sometimes my gender has played into that. I don’t think the EA community is particularly sexist. As it turns out, sexism is everywhere. I also don’t think it’s particularly not sexist, though that’s tricky for me to gauge as one person with one set of experiences. However, I do feel comfortable saying that EA has a unique flavour of sexism that I had to learn to navigate and defend against.

I want to share two reflections that have been especially important for me:

1. Most problems are caused by a handful of people — but the majority are not particularly empathetic to sexism, nor protective.

This is a common truth and trap across many gendered issues. A very small minority of people are responsible for concrete harm, but they’re protected.

It is very hard to be heard by the wider EA community when you are trying to describe sexism. There’s an air of defensiveness and counter-accusation, even among those who do not perpetrate instances of harassment. The way I’ve psychologised this is:

Many men in EA have suffered from exclusion, and so they default to defensiveness around anything that smells of exclusion.

They have an internal narrative that is either:

• Exclusion hurt me deeply, so I must defend others against it, or

• I am scared to one day be excluded again, so I must ensure that a norm of exclusion is not allowed to develop

And so, the health of the community suffers and the targets of sexism suffer.

The defensive responses are too exhausting. Without even providing names, I say, “a friend and coworker asked me out at a work retreat and later said rude things about me and shared personal details about my life with other coworkers,” the response from many is:

“Maybe they’re autistic.”
“They just haven’t thought carefully about how to navigate interpersonal relationships at work, they weren’t trying to hurt you, they’re just struggling.”

I say, “This person kept touching me, it was uncomfortable and felt like a norm violation.” The response from many is:

“Maybe they’re autistic.”
“Maybe they thought you two were closer than you actually are.”
“Maybe they’re more rationalist than you and they have a different relationship to connection and intimacy and nonverbal communication and—”

It’s interesting, because in these instances, I’m never talking about intention. I’m never saying, “this person condescends me because they are sexist” or “this person touches me because they are malicious.” And yet, immediately, a charitable intention is proposed to me. An explanation offered, the action is defended. Lest I start getting any ideas of even daring to suggest ill intent.

But I don’t care that much about intent anymore, because I’ve learned it’s a losing game. I don’t care if they are autistic or traumatised or delusional or shy or if free will exists or doesn’t. At a point, we’ve just lost the plot entirely. I am identifying an action that I want stopped. I do not need to have my empathy invoked. I naturally have immense empathy—often to my own detriment, often to a far greater degree than the “intention explorers” I’m conversing with. I am voicing a hurt and a need. And a helpful solution might be as simple as giving someone feedback. Or even just offering recognition.

In my experience, I have been harmed by a handful of people and helped by a handful of people. The community health team at CEA and trusted community members who consistently meet me, they have helped me feel excited to remain in the community.

But not everyone feels comfortable going to community health. Not everyone has a network of people they trust. And so, they bounce off. They don’t necessarily bounce off to somewhere “better.” But our goal isn’t to be as sexist as comparable communities, or slightly better on some metrics and the same on others and a bit worse on others. Ideally.

2. I used to think I faced sexism and boundary violations because I lacked assertiveness. I no longer think this. But, I think much of the community’s norms reinforce this narrative.

I grew up with one abusive parent and one fairly dissociated parent. As a child, I was told that other peoples’ actions were my fault, even if they harmed me. And I believed it.

Into adulthood, whenever I got hurt, I spent a lot of time constructing a narrative around how I contributed to that hurt. And sometimes, it was true and productive. And sometimes, I was simply not responsible. And it left me incredibly vulnerable.

When I first got into EA, at 19 and into my early twenties, these narratives were alive and well within me. I took some amount of responsibility for most of the harm I experienced:

I didn’t communicate my boundaries clearly.
I was overly friendly.
My feedback was too harsh; it was too difficult for them to receive.
I’m bottling things up and then giving too much feedback at once, it’s overwhelming, it’s not digestible.
I’m overstating harm.
I’m not considering their perspective enough. I don’t have enough empathy for men. Or people who struggle with social cues. Or people who are lonely. Or all the ways in which I might have hurt their feelings. Or—

And so on. I would maintain these narratives until I “snapped”. And even then, “snapping” for me would be a harsh but deliberate series of texts saying, “your behaviour has harmed me and here’s how. Enough.”

About a year ago, a switch kind of flipped in my brain. I became assertive and more self-possessed in real-time interactions. I was speaking my mind far more. I was clear. I didn’t slip into a fawn response as easily.

And I remember thinking, woah, the few men in EA who I have a strained relationship with, but still have to interact with, are going to be so relieved! Because for so long, the problem was that I didn’t stand up for myself or communicate well. Now they’ll see how much progress I’ve made! They’ll be so excited to hear my honest perspective, or to watch me say “stop that” in real-time, even if it’s not particularly pleasing or considerate of their wants!

They were not excited. They hated it.

And I watched my whole narrative break. I remember a flood of anger. Because it turned out, the problem wasn’t that my cues were too difficult to read. Or that I was too passive or too fawning or too inarticulate. That was mostly a convenient story. The problem was: they did not care what I wanted if it contradicted what they wanted.

My history meant that I came into EA with a well-practiced capacity for self-blame, but the reality is, self-blame is pushed onto women in general. Women are told they are part of the puzzle of their own experiences of harassment or unwanted advances. That they don’t stand up for themselves, or communicate clearly, or extend enough empathy, or examine themselves.

It’s not true.

I won’t dredge this up, but many years ago a girl tweeted (approximately), “a guy hit on me at an EA meetup :(”

She was a university student. The response was terrible. It got a lot of attention from the online EA community. For clarity: I don’t mean to suggest that she was describing harassment, not at all; rather, I bring this up because the onslaught of replies were an illustration of exactly what happens when you try to express even simple dissatisfaction or negative sentiment. There were some expressions of sympathy drowned out by a lot of dissection. Comments and quote tweets of meta discussion with an unacknowledged undertone of panic from some men:

“Whoa whoa, what’s wrong with flirting?”
“Are we not allowed to flirt at meetups?”
“What does it mean to flirt?”
“Did she say she didn’t want it or was he supposed to just know that we’re apparently not allowed to flirt? Could someone please confirm if that’s the rule? Could OP please clarify exactly what this man did, shot-for-shot, so we can operationalise a definition of flirting and then better assess this situation?”
“What if I flirt with someone who seems okay with it and then they tweet about me and my life is ruined? Should we have a norm against that?”

At one point, someone ran a poll in her replies so they could “get a better sense of what the other women in EA felt.” It didn’t read as malicious. It read to me as a bunch of men with a lot of unprocessed fear and loneliness channeling all their emotions into finding some object level truth that didn’t exist, but that if found, would protect them from ever hurting a woman. Or rather, from ever being accused of hurting a woman. It also read to me as a lack of interest in empathising with a foreign experience. Or even just letting a foreign experience exist in public.

A meta discussion was not needed. There was no suggestion of banning flirting. No call for punishment. Just a young woman, feeling some kind of dissatisfaction, tweeting that a young man hit on her at an EA meetup. That feeling is allowed to exist. Also, it’s useful. It can tell us something about how different people experience the world.

If a response of curiosity or empathy isn’t possible, then at the very least, the feeling should be allowed to sit there. It doesn’t need to be met with panic and baggage. It turns into a game of dodgeball that you never asked to play. You didn’t realise you were apparently walking onto a court, you thought you were just expressing yourself in a public space, with your friends in mind. And now everyone is throwing balls at you.

Advice

If you have been harmed…

I wrote about my experience with the Community health team here. I really do trust them. I’d recommend reaching out to them if you ever need help, there are a lot of ways you can contact them, including anonymously (their info page is here).

If you are feeling frustrated, hurt, annoyed, etc…

I have a post on the trap of being overly charitable. My main advice is: you get to feel however you want. And you are not responsible for other people’s fear or panic or loneliness.
You are not responsible for figuring out how everyone can find a girlfriend.
You are a person in a community, at an event, in a job, for your own purpose.

You do not need to answer the question “what should the community-wide norms be around x” in order to express personal discomfort at a specific moment. That is an absurd ask. It will only lead to you never being able to voice anything—unless you want to spend the rest of your life studying community dynamics, HR, policy, and game theory.

If someone has disclosed harm to you, or even something less serious (frustration, annoyance, etc.)…

Just be curious about their experience. It is not your job to “make it better.” It is also not your job to litigate and determine some ground truth of responsibility or blame or psychology. And remember, you don’t have to engage with topics you are not equipped to. I would be over the moon if more people felt comfortable saying, “I don’t know much about that but it sounds really upsetting, you should talk to community health,” or, “you should talk to someone you trust.” I get that this is a socially unusual response, but it is far better than trying to navigate a topic you are panicky about, defensive around, uneducated on, lacking empathy in, or not up for discussing productively and supportively.