I have a question for you. What do snow plowing, car safety, investment management, and face recognition technologies all have in common? They all have impacts that are genderly. That is things that we think are somehow gender-neutral like snow plowing, may not be. This gender analytics specialization is all about why this happens and what you can do about it. Let's take snow plowing. Most municipalities focus on getting the roads clear after a major snowfall. But when you clear the snow from the roads before you clear the sidewalks, it turns out that you get many more slip and fall accidents. Most of these are women, because they are the ones more likely to be walking kids to school in the mornings. Or what about car safety? We see that women are 47 percent more likely to be injured and 17 percent more likely to die when they get in a car accident, because most vehicle crash tests are done with crash test dummies that are male-sized or have male physical features, or investment management. Research shows that women are highly likely to leave their investment advisors when their spouses pass away, because those advisors had never worked with them effectively. Or let's look at facial recognition technology. It's coming under fire for many reasons these days. But one important one is that they are much less accurate and recognizing women's faces, especially women of color. In all of these examples, policymakers and business leaders are failing to consider gender impacts in the ways that they design policies, products, services, and processes. This specialization is meant to help address those gender gaps, and also help you create new insights for transformational innovation. I'm Sarah Kaplan. A Professor of Strategic Management at the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management and Director of the Institute for Gender and the Economy, otherwise known by its acronym GATE. My pronouns are: she, her, hers. I'll be your guide through this specialization on gender analytics. Before we get started, I want to acknowledge that the land on which the University of Toronto was located is the traditional territory of many nations including the: Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishnaabe, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee, and the Wendat peoples, and is now home to many diverse First Nations: Inuit and Metis from across Turtle Island. Toronto is covered by Treaty 13 with the Mississaugas of the Credit, and we are grateful to be able to work on this land. In these courses, you will learn to recognize the ways that policies, products, services, and processes are gendered, and how those impacts are often intensified when you also consider other intersecting identities such as: race, ability, Indigeneity, sexual orientation, or socioeconomic class. These dynamic shape the risks, opportunities, and impacts of many of your organization's activities and outcomes. You will use these insights to uncover hidden possibilities for innovation, and improved effectiveness. GATE developed this course with you in mind, and we are grateful for the support of Catalyst Inc, CIBC, PWC, and Women and Gender Equality Canada for their support of this project. We designed this course based on intensive consultations with a wide variety of potential learners to understand your unmet needs and what it will take for you to build gender analytics capabilities. These five courses will give you a roadmap. In this first course, you will develop fluency in the key concepts used in gender analytics including language associated with gender and intersectionality, and learn how ignoring these factors can create unnecessary risks while understanding them can lead to innovative ideas to grow markets or increase impact. In later courses you will acquire competencies in quantitative and qualitative data collection and analysis, paying particular attention to the impacts on vulnerable and marginalized populations. Use human-centered design techniques to come up with transformational innovations using gender-based insights. Build your transformational leadership skills so that you can use gender analytics to drive change. If you do the whole series, you'll gain access to the capstone project where you'll get a chance to practice all of these skills in gender analytics. These skills are applicable to a wide variety of careers: from business managers and leaders interested in using intersectional gender insights to innovate and improve performance, to government and NGO professionals who want to incorporate gender-based analysis and gender budgeting in their work, to gender and women's studies experts who are seeking job-related applications for their skills, to business analytics experts looking to extend their skills to questions of equity, or to human resource professionals or diversity and inclusion leads such as chief diversity officers looking to be more effective partners to support business innovation and growth. In all of these cases, gender-based insights can inform innovative new ways of working, doing business, or designing policy. Throughout the specialization, we're going to give examples from all of these different kinds of contexts. So you will see examples about the gendered effects of government policy or marketing campaigns, or of products and services, or of organizational practices. Not all of these might exactly align with your current job, but one thing I've realized from my many years as a consultant and educator, is that we often learn the most from examples that are outside our usual jobs. I encourage you to listen to and learn from all of these different cases and examples. I wanted to highlight a unique feature of this specialization. Many courses on gender and diversity tend to focus on the talent side of the equation. So they emphasize: recruiting, hiring, retention, and advancement to create diversity inside organizations. These considerations are for sure important. However, in this course we're going to look at inclusion when it comes to how you serve your markets, or constituencies, and beneficiaries. We'll turn our attention to the ways that policies, products, services, and processes are designed and what kind of impact they have. We'll be thinking about how intersectional gender-based insights can create innovative opportunities for growth and avoid downside risks. I think you will see as we go through these courses together, how questions of diverse talent are intimately intertwined with questions of inclusive innovation. You can't have one without the other. The more you want to create inclusive policies and products, the more you will need to have a more diverse and inclusive team. In the fourth course of this specialization which will be on transformational leadership, you'll have a chance to explore these interactions in more detail. You'll meet all of our faculty in the next video. This is a very carefully curated set of experts. Each of them is really terrific and will bring their own unique style and expertise to your learning over the five courses. I have also invited a number of super interesting guests to talk about their own experiences and enrich the insights with case studies from their work. But I don't want you to just watch videos about gender analytics, I want you to do it. Our emphasis throughout is on practicing your skills, reflecting on your own ways of working and developing a work plan for conducting an innovative gender analytics project to take forward after the course. You'll get an opportunity to interact and learn from your peers following the discussion prompts as they come up in the courses. This specialization is about practice and about practical skills. By the end of this course, you will have tasted the potential of using gender analytics to create powerful innovations and avoid unnecessary risks. You will have examined your own assumptions to see how they are influencing your choices. People say that once you put the gender glasses on, you never take them off. It's a whole new way of seeing the world, and it will give you insights for making radical transformations. I look forward to seeing you as you progress through the courses in this specialization.
