Welcome 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: EA Survey 2020: Demographics, published by David_Moss on the Effective Altruism Forum. EA Survey 2020: Community Demographics Summary We collected 2,166 valid responses from EAs in the survey The composition of the EA community remains similar to last year, in terms of age (82% 34 or younger), race (76% white) and gender (71% male) The median age when EAs reported getting involved in the community was 24 More than two thirds (69%) of our sample were non-students and <15% were undergraduates. Roughly equal proportions of non-student EAs report being in for-profit (earning to give), for-profit (not earning to give), non-profit (EA), non-profit (not EA), government, think tank/lobbying/advocacy careers. More respondents seem to be prioritizing career capital than immediate impact Introduction The demographic composition of the EA community has been much discussed. In this post we report on the composition of the EA Survey sample. In future posts we will investigate whether these factors influence different outcomes such as cause selection or experience of the EA community. This year, we removed questions about religion, politics, and diet to make room for an additional set of requested questions. However, we intend to re-include these next year and at least every other year going forward. The normal caveats about not knowing the degree to which the EA Survey sample is representative of the broader EA population apply. Ultimately, since no one knows what the true composition of the EA community is, it is impossible for us to know to what degree the EA Survey is representative. We discuss these issues further here in a hosted dynamic document (with data, code, and commentary). In that document we investigate how key characteristics of our sample are sensitive to which source (e.g. EA Newsletter, Facebook link) referred participants to the EA Survey and to measures that seem like they may be proxies for participation rates (such as willingness to be contacted about future surveys). Note: full size versions of graphs can be viewed by opening them in a new tab. Basic Demographics Gender The proportion of respondents who were male, female or other was very similar (to within a percentage point) to last year. Race/ethnicity Our race/ethnicity question allowed respondents to pick multiple categories. We re-coded respondents based on whether they selected only one category or multiple. While around 83% of respondents selected ‘White’ (compared to 86.9% last year), some of these respondents also selected other categories. Taking this into account, around 75.9% of the sample selected only white. Age The EA community remains disproportionately young, with a median age of 27 (mean 29). Moreover, there is an extremely sharp dropoff in the frequency of respondents from around age 35. Around 80% of our respondents are younger than this age, which means that there are fewer respondents in our sample older than 34 than there are women or non-white respondents. Changes in Age over Time That said, as we noted , the average age of EA Survey respondents appears to have increased fairly steadily over time. This makes sense because EAs (like non-EAs) get one year older annually. However, this effect is counterbalanced by new EAs joining the movement each year, and these new members being younger than average. In this year’s survey, the average age of respondents was slightly lower than last year (though still higher than 2014-2015). Age of First Getting Involved in EA The age at which people typically first get involved in EA has previously been discussed (e.g. ). The median age when respondents reported having first gotten involved in EA was 24 (with a slightly higher mean of 26). Notably, while young, this is slightly older than the typical age of an undergraduate student (which is often tho...