Gender Equity Advocates Seminar & Workshop: Orthodox Leadership Project Cohort 11

The Gender Equity in Hiring Project and the Orthodox Leadership Project invite all alumnae of OLP to join a dedicated Gender Equity Advocates Cohort specifically for those working in the Orthodox community. This 11th cohort will bring women together in dialogue with the twin goals of advancing capacity to note and speak about gender bias in the Jewish workplace, and advocate for gender equity and their own individual advancement.

As a Gender Equity Advocate, you'll join the communal effort to address gender bias in the Jewish workplace, with a specific focus on how employees are hired, retained, employed and advanced by our Jewish organizations. We begin with our biases, contemplating where our personal stories intersect with our work. We then step into these biases, examining how they function in our lives and work, how they influence our communication and decision-making, and where our biases emerge in intersection with hiring and employment. We then consider the multi-phased work of the hiring committee and our professional partners, and the various steps of the hiring process, as we imagine how to constitute these committees and professional roles to effectively combat bias and strive for equity. As we reimagine this process, we consider our first strategies toward building equity into our work through the makeup of committees, our questions and our planning and design.

Our Learning:   As we engage in close textual reading as a tool to consider how language influences behavior, we continue to consider our biases, as we notice and observe social and cultural norms and shift our behavior. We use job descriptions to evaluate language and evaluate ourselves, as our primary text to lift up opportunities to create gender equitable internal and external organizational processes.

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We design for action, as we uncover helpful, practical strategies for identifying challenges in hiring and employment processes, with templates for advocacy located in thoughtful, organizational strategy and a desire to create supportive, equitable workplace cultures. Our work is deeply relational, and we focus on considering and mapping the roles we play in our organizations, and those with whom we are in relationship. In order to more deeply understand power and connection, and clarify our images of leadership, we tap into our own power to advocate and make change.

We believe that hiring and employment processes that are more gender-equitable enable women to rise to positions of leadership, and will also enable our Jewish organizations to hire the best candidates at the same time--and that a rising tide will lift all ships, supporting all those who work in the Jewish not-for-profit sector to be enriched and satisfied by their work, regardless of gender. We believe that designing for equity in hiring and employment processes requires us to be intersectional in our thinking and our practice, and we invite you to join us in this space.  Our work is to tap into the greatest potential our community has to offer, and to enable us to release our biases and preconceived notions that hold us back from recognizing the powerful human resources in our midst. If you are ready to begin advocating for yourself and your colleagues, and this is a change that you feel committed to amplifying, we invite you to join us.

Beginning with our Biases​  (Session 1)

We begin with ourselves, and what it might mean to look at the world differently as we notice where our minds may be biased, and where we are able to shift our behavior toward less biased choices. Where are the stories that we can tell about our own choices? We will begin by telling stories, and noting where our stories intersect where our work as advocates for gender equity at work and in our communities. We step into our own biases, contemplating implicit bias, examining how it functions in our lives, how it influences communication and decision-making, and where it emerges in intersection with hiring, advancement and employment in our Jewish organizations.

Our Employment Life-Cycle (Session 2)

We enter into this learning as women who work in and lead our Jewish community, understanding that there are cycles to our lives and cycles to hiring, employment and advancement that are both seen and unseen. How can we be aware of these cycles, what might we learn from them, and how might we influence them? As we reimagine this process, we consider our beginning strategies toward building equity into our work, through a variety of lenses including the pipeline for advancement, job searches, interviewing, and the constitution of boards and hiring committees. We will consider various phases of this cycle, where we are as individuals, and where we might strive to move next.

Examining Language, Examining Ourselves (Session 3)

• We engage in close textual reading as a tool to consider how language influences behavior, interact with biases, reinforce social and cultural norms and shift our behavior, using job descriptions as our primary text to lift up opportunities to create gender equitable internal and external organizational processes. By looking deeply into language, we will examine ourselves, our roles, and our work.
• We have ample evidence that women’s titles are used less frequently than men’s titles. This takes on a very powerful valence in a community where in our world, some titles are accorded only to men, and are opportunities to wield power and advance. How might we consider the use of title as a creative opportunity to accord honor, to advance, and to be attentive, where possible, to gender gaps in leadership? We will consider title and honor, and examine deeply what it might take to professionalize roles with or without dependence solely on title. Acknowledging the role of rabbis in our communal picture, how might we consider language, professionalize our titles, accord ourselves the honor we deserve as professionals, and elevate ourselves in the process

Understanding Our Social Networks (Session 4)

The social intimacy of working in our communities confers both powerful benefit and great risk. We recognize that our relationships come with great power and potential, and that we must recognize that power, how to leverage it, and where it comes with opportunity and danger. We will use social network analysis and power mapping to understand how those with whom we are in relationship can help us to grow, and can also challenge our advancement and the advancement of others around us.

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Power & Advocacy (Session 5)

As we rise, we accrue power that often goes unnoticed and untapped. As leaders, we have power, and the privilege to use it responsibly. As we come to a close, we uncover helpful, practical strategies for considering our power, identifying our own discomfort in using and acting on our power, and effective tools for advocacy as we engage our voices for change. Our tools reside both in our voices and in our actions, in the field, in our communities and at work,  located in thoughtful, organizational strategy and a desire to create supportive, equitable workplace cultures, and to shift our Jewish community to think and behave differently as we too are learning to be different.

Schedule:  The Gender Equity Advocates Seminar meets on Tuesdays & Wednesdays for a total of 5 sessions. Note that session dates and times vary.

• Tuesday, July 19              1:00-4:30pm ET/10:00am-1:30pm PT
• Wednesday, July 20      1:00-3:00pm ET/10:00am-12:00pm PT
• Tuesday, July 26             1:00-4:30pm ET/10:00am-1:30pm PT
• Tuesday, August 2          1:00-4:30pm ET/10:00am-1:30pm PT
• Tuesday, August 9         1:00-4:30pm ET/10:00am-1:30pm PT

Registration is limited to 20.

Time Commitment & Participation: Expectations

Our virtual sessions are 3 hours each over the course of a month, with scheduled breaks over each session for stretching our bodies and minds (for a total of 12 virtual hours). We also expect that each Advocate will prepare for each session with a combination of pre-learning, time in chevruta (dialogue and conversation with learning partners) and independent learning, drawn from a fantastic curated selection of short articles, blog posts, podcasts, videos and a multitude of other creative sources (approximately 3 hours over the full month, for a total of 15 hours, including our virtual sessions). We expect that those who enroll will participate fully for the duration of the month-long program, in all parts of the program, to the best of their ability.

Gender Equity Advocates Network:  Upon the completion of our learning together, all participants will join a network of 140+ Gender Equity Advocates engaged in changing their organizations from the inside, working across the Jewish community to speak up as voices for change in a variety of spaces, communities and portfolios, all noticing and all in partnership. Membership in our Gender Equity Advocates Network is included.

Accommodations & Learning Modalities: We prioritize the needs of our learners as adults: our virtual learning community is a flipped classroom, one in which participants are invited to engage in independent learning before and in between sessions to prepare material (typically a choice of short articles, podcasts and videos) before they join sessions. Sessions are designed to engage a variety of modalities, from dialogue to small group work to design, writing and reflection. Our learning together involves dialogue, small group work, discussion, writing, reflection, chat/polling and other forms of active virtual participation. Each session will include pre- and post- work. It is not a webinar format. If you need support or any accommodations, please let us know how we can welcome you and support you best.

Cost:   This workshop is in part underwritten by the Leader Family Fund and the Safety Respect Equity Network, and our generous donors who make our work possible. Because our work is rooted in equity as a value, we approach the cost of our work with an equity lens well. We believe that equity is about giving people what they need, in order to make things fair. The concept of equity is synonymous with fairness and justice. Here, we can use equity to build a system of trusting each other, to be willing to give and to receive, and to see all of us as one whole, working together to build a more equitable world.

Please contact us at info@genderequityinhiringproject.org with any questions