GENDER EQUITY ADVOCATES WORKSHOP
We believe that hiring and employment processes that are more gender-equitable will help organizations help women rise to positions of leadership and enable them to hire the best candidates at the same time.
Let's design the resources we need to identify the diverse talent and leadership that will lead our Jewish community forward. And at the same time, let's work together to create equitable, just workplaces that will strive to recognize the wholeness of each person and help us, and our community, to flourish.
Our Gender Equity Advocates will spend time considering how bias and stereotyping affect our hiring and advancement, immersing themselves in a variety of employment processes, considering how organizations prepare, interview candidates and offer positions. We'll contemplate how to create culture, how to navigate change flexibly, and how to understand power as it lives in our organizations as we prepare ourselves to be the advocates for gender equity that our community needs. This work is done in community and collaboration as we weave a network of change with colleagues. Learn more below and join over 170 individuals in over 150 organizations who are striving to notice and make change wherever possible.
BE OUR PARTNER IN ADVOCATING FOR CHANGE.
WHO SHOULD APPLY?
Our Gender Equity Advocates are individual professionals and lay leaders fundamental to the success of their organizations and communities, embedded in their Jewish community as this work is done within their current roles and within community. Gender Equity Advocates represent a diverse assembly of Jewish communal professionals and volunteer lay leaders, and are prepared to serve as voices for all kinds of change toward gender-equitable and unbiased processes, language and behaviors across our Jewish organizations. Each of our cohort members, by virtue of their advocacy, role, interest and passion is thus positioned to build organizational and communal capacity.
All participants in our programs, learning and advocacy efforts embody these values and skills as well. We welcome all those who are curious, passionate and eager to learn, within their current professional and/or volunteer roles, as we dive deeply into this work.
We especially welcome participation from marginalized communities inside our larger Jewish community. This gives us all a chance to learn from a diversity of voices and to include the wide array of perspectives that make up the wisdom in our communal room.
MORE INFORMATION
Most of our Gender Equity Advocates Workshops are virtual. Those hosted by individual communities are typically hybrid, with some combination of in-person and virtual learning. Our Workshops consist of approximately 4-6 sessions, weekly (over a 4-6 week period) or over a series of months (2-3 months).
Gender Equity Advocates Network
All who take part in our Gender Equity Advocates Workshops are welcomed as members of our Network following the completion of the workshop series. Learn more about our Network here, and the kinds of learning, convening and connection we can offer.
Nominate a Colleague
We encourage nominations: please feel free to share this with others who will benefit from being a part of this work.
Our Approach to Equity: Equitable Fees
Because our work is rooted in equity as a value, we bring an equity lens to our payment and fees as 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 pay what they can, 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.
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BALANCE: This price point is what we consider a balanced exchange for the experience, learning, and resources we're creating.
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SUSTAIN and GROW: If you (and/or your employer) are able to offer more to help keep this work accessible and equitable so that others can participate and we can continue to grow, please choose this price point. In doing so, you sustain our work and the ability of others to participate without having to ask.
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SUPPORT: If your participation requires a partial scholarship, please select this price point.
Please note that fees include all materials and e-access to our resources, and a lifetime membership in our Network, as well as discounts on future programming.
PREVIEW OUR WORK TOGETHER: Our Curriculum
Beginning with our Biases
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We begin with ourselves, and where our stories Intersect with our work as gender equity advocates. 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 and employment.
The Hiring & Employment Life-Cycle
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We consider the multi-phased work of the hiring committee, and the various steps of the hiring process, as we imagine how to constitute these committees 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.
Evaluating Language, Evaluating Ourselves
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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 postings as our primary text to lift up opportunities to create gender equitable Internal and external organizational processes.
Designing for Action
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We uncover helpful, practical strategies for identifying challenges in hiring and employment processes, design templates for action, and effective ways to advocate for change, located in thoughtful, organizational strategy and a desire to create supportive, equitable workplace cultures.
Voices of Advocacy & Power
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We map out relationships and consider the roles we play in our organizations, through professional and lay relationships, power and connection, and images of leadership, all in an effort to consider how we as advocates have our own power to make change.
Click here for more details about our curriculum and information to share about our Gender Equity Advocates Workshops
PREPARING TO ADVOCATE: Flipping Our Learning
Our Stories
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In order to be effective advocates and strive for the bold change we hope to make, we begin inside ourselves, locating our work in the experiences and the stories that bring us to this work. Through deep personal connection, we forge the relationships that make change possible, and enable us to feel the integrity and wholeness that enable us to move forward.
Contemplating Our Readiness
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How "ready" are we to speak up? How ready are we to make change? To take on the role of advocate requires not just learning but a certain mindset and frame of reference. We will explore our own mindsets (and our communities and our organizations) as we embark on this journey to learn together. Some of us may be more experienced with advocacy, others may not yet have experience speaking up. Others may be positioned to do this work easily inside their workplaces, others may struggle. We'll all engage in thinking about how we'll step out of our learning and into advocacy as we prepare to embark on this journey--even before we take a step together.
Designing for Action
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We uncover helpful, practical strategies for identifying challenges in hiring and employment processes, design templates for action, and effective ways to advocate for change, located in thoughtful, organizational strategy and a desire to create supportive, equitable workplace cultures.
Elevating Expertise
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Many of our Gender Equity Advocates come to this work with rich backgrounds in diversity, equity, inclusion and justice (DEIJ) work in other spaces. We invite that expertise and aspire to elevate it. Some of our greatest learning edges over time have been when our Gender Equity Advocates have brought their expertise to challenge us, to push us to be deliberately and thoughtfully intersectional, and to contemplate where we are relying on patriarchal and yet invisible norms and structures. We look forward to harvesting and learning from your expertise. Our goal is to mesh our work in spaces that emphasize D & I with a deep investment in our expertise in the equity space, bringing a gender lens to our work and elevating and amplifying equity in all of our spaces.
IN ADVANCE & ONGOING
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In preparation for our first session (and in between each session), Gender Equity Advocates will be invited to engage in pre-reading and pre-work. This enables us to create a richer learning space and "flip the classroom" so that we can spend our time together connecting with each other through the content instead of engagement in frontal learning. "Pre-work" also involves weaving relationships with our colleagues in advance of our sessions, and in dialogue between our sessions, to advance our learning together.
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Pre- and post-learning resources will include short readings and articles, audits and quizzes, podcasts and videos, and opportunities for time spent with Cohort colleagues in interviews, conversations and rich dialogue about our learning. We promise a variety of learning engagements. If you have a resource you'd like to contribute or suggest, please share it with us.
