[MUSIC] Hello everyone, and welcome to gender and sexuality, diversion and inclusion in the workplace. I'm Dr. Susan Marine, and together with Dr. Julie Beaulieu, we'll be your instructors for this course. In this course, we'll explore ideas such as, what is sex? What is gender? What is sexuality? What do mean by lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex and asexual, also known as LGBTQIA? How are these concepts related to the workplace? How have our understandings of these terms changed over time and how have these changes impacted work and culture? To help you answer these important questions, this course will introduce you to the exciting field of gender sexuality and women's studies, and to LGBTQIA identities. We will use a range of interdisciplinary concepts, tools and methods to understand and analyze how identity shapes are experiences in culture and in the workplace. Because we all live with gender expectations, this course is crucial for any profession and for understanding the world around us. Also, you will learn key concepts that will help you to interpret and understand the world we share and to help effect positive change for others. An important thing to understand as we begin our exploration together is that many of these terms and concepts are relatively recent and are continuously evolving as our understandings of how people identify, how they experience the world in those identities, and how they form communities with one another, change, and shift. For example, as recently as ten years ago, the word homosexual would have been a perfectly fine term for everyday use. But with time, greater visibility, and better understanding of the experiences of gay and lesbian people in society, the terms gay and lesbian are far more likely to be used now rather than homosexual, to respectfully refer to people with those identities. This course will help you understand these terms and concepts in a historical context. You will understand how we have come to understand them, and how they have evolved and changed. As we have developed new understanding, as well as theories about the ways that sexuality and gender function in our world and workplaces. By providing this context, we hope to give you a strong working language and understanding of LGBTQIA issues in contemporary society. To help you understand how these identities dovetail with and fit into the contemporary workplace, and how we as individuals and collectively can work together to make our workplaces more LGBTQIA inclusive. >> Hello, I'm Dr. Julie Beaulieu. We will also provide you with the tools to understand and to explore gender and sexual diversity particularly in work environments. Both, Susan and I have been committed to the field of gender and sexuality studies for quite some time and we welcome the opportunity to discuss diversity and inclusion with you. Many of the lectures provided in this course will take a historical, theoretical and or cross cultural approach. All of these approaches to gender and sexuality assume that gender and sexuality are socially constructed. As we hope to show, there is a direct relationship between theory and practice. How we think about gender and sexual difference shapes how we engage with ourselves and others. Thinking critically about gender and sexuality and being attuned to the social forces that shape different experiences is central to building inclusive workplaces and communities. We hope to raise your curiosity about gender and sexual diversity in your own social and cultural contexts. We encourage you to consider how your locations shapes your views of gender and sexuality and to share this information with your classmates. There will be a many opportunities through out this course to engage with others on complex questions. It's likely that we would disagree on topics. Such disagreement on gender sexuality is in fact clear evidence that gender and sexuality are socially constructed. Please be respectful to others especially when you disagree. We will begin with a full exploration of terminology and concepts related to gender, sexuality, and relationship of these two important vectors of identity. Thank you for joining us. [MUSIC]
