EA - Racial and gender demographics at EA Global in 2022 by Amy Labenz

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: Racial and gender demographics at EA Global in 2022, published by Amy Labenz on March 10, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.CEA has recently conducted a series of analyses to help us better understand how people of different genders and racial backgrounds experienced EA Global events in 2022 (not including EAGx). In response to some requests (like this one), we wanted to share some preliminary findings.This post is primarily going to report on some summary statistics. We are still investigating pieces of this picture but wanted to get the raw data out fast for others to look at, especially since we suspect this may help shed light on other broad trends within EA.High-level summaryAttendees:33% of registered attendees (and 35% of applicants) at EA Global events in 2022 self-reported as female or non-binary.33% of registered attendees (and 38% of applicants) self-reported as people of color (“POC”).Experiences:Attendees generally find EA Global welcoming (4.51/5 with 1–5 as options) and are likely to recommend it to others (9.03/10 with 0–10 as options).Women and non-binary attendees reported that they find EA Global slightly less welcoming (4.46/5 compared to 4.56/5 for men and 4.51 overall).Otherwise, we found no statistically significant difference in terms of feelings of welcomeness and overall recommendation scores across groups in terms of gender and race/ethnicity.Speakers:43% of speakers and MCs at EA Global events in 2022 were female or non-binary.28% of speakers and MCs were people of color.Some initial takeaways:A more diverse set of people apply to and attend EAG than complete the EA survey.Welcomingness and likelihood to recommend scores for women and POC were very similar to the overall scores.There is a small but statistically significant difference in welcomingness scores for women.We are not sure what to make of the fact that the application stats for POC were higher than the admissions stats. We are currently investigating whether this demographic is newer to EA (our best guess) and if that might be influencing the admissions rate.One update for our team is that women / non-binary speaker stats are higher compared to the applicant pool and this is not the case for POC. We had not realized that prior to conducting this analysis.The 2022 speaker statistics appear to be broadly in line with our statistics since London 2018 when we started tracking. We had significantly less diverse speakers prior to EAG London 2018.Applicants and registrantsFor EA Globals in 2022, our applicant pool was slightly more diverse in terms of race/ethnicity than our attendee pool (38% of applicants were POC vs. 33% of attendees), and around the same in terms of gender (35% of applicants were female or non-binary vs. 33% of attendees).For comparison, our attendee pool has about the same composition in terms of gender as the respondents in the 2020 EA Survey and is more diverse in terms of race/ethnicity than that survey.We had much more racial diversity at EAGx events outside of the US and Europe (e.g. EAGxSingapore, EAGxLatAm, and EAGxIndia, where POC were the majority). Generally, EAGx attendees end up later attending EAGs, so we think the events could result in more attendees from these locations. (However, due to funding constraints and their impact on travel grants, we expect this will not impact EAGs in 2023 as much as it might have otherwise.)Experiences of attendeesOverall, attendees tend to find EA Global welcoming (4.51/5 with 1–5 as options) and are likely to recommend it to others (9.03/10 with 0–10 as options).Women and non-binary attendees reported slightly lower average scores on whether EA Global was “a place where [they] felt welcome” (women and non-binary attendees reported an average score of 4.46/5 vs an average of 4.56/5 for me...