 With us today, we have Toshie Ayo-Ario. Currently, she is the co-founder of Uinclude, where she's building tech solutions that establish equity in the recruitment process and increase workplace diversity. Uinclude is a platform that empowers the most equitable and effective recruitment process for employers. Hi everyone, my name is Toshie. I am the co-founder of Uinclude, and Uinclude is a company that leverages scientific research and machine learning to generate the most equitable and effective hiring process for employers. So at Uinclude, we are solving two problems. The first is that is the fact that workplace diversity rates are severely lacking. In fact, only about 20% of people on the workforce are part of underrepresented groups, while on average almost 80% of the US, UK and Canadian populations identify with a marginalized group. The second problem is that hiring processes are costly, prolonged, and many times ineffective. So we're solving those two problems by addressing a major yet overlooked barrier to underrepresented candidates entering the workplace, and something that is also a major contributor to ineffective hiring processes, all of which happens in the job ad construction stage of the hiring lifecycle. And that issue is bias language and recruitment material, and more generally, the lack of inclusive and appealing language and recruitment material. In fact, our research shows that about 70% of job ads are actually dominated by gender bias and racially exclusive language. So many people don't recognize just how powerful language is in influencing people's behavior. This is especially true in recruiting. The language we use can perpetuate institutional inequality and deter qualified candidates from applying for roles. I really want to emphasize here, though, that it's often the subtle and the inconspicuous language that has the biggest impact. And why is that? It's because we don't know that these words carry harmful undertones. And because of that lack of knowledge, our job ads are often filled with off-putting language. So to address this, we took on two approaches. The first is to identify the subtle and the pernicious language that is deterring for candidates. A research paper written years ago discussed the impacts that gender bias language has on both female and male job seekers and their decision to apply. The paper also provided an extensive list of words that are gender bias that we should avoid using in our job descriptions. But when we started, you include, we couldn't find any research study that, again, identify the subtle language that is deterring for other underrepresented groups besides female job seekers. And that was a huge priority for us and will always be a priority for us. And so our team decided to launch our own scientific research study, starting with race-based, inclusive, and exclusive language. And our research report and findings are now available on our Research and Insights page on our website. The second way that we are addressing this problem is by creating our core product, which is an algorithm that has a number of functions. It scans your job ads and highlights all of the coded language that is in your job ad. And then it gives employers a breakdown of how gender bias, racially exclusive, and overall inclusive the job ad is. It also educates you on what impact those words are. What impact the words that are being highlighted are and how they may be impacting job seekers' appeal and decision to apply. And then on top of that, it provides you with suggestions on words to replace problematic language with. And then finally, it gives you tips on how to infuse inclusive themes into your job ads. We just launched a new version of our product a few weeks ago. We are obviously very eager to get it into the hands of employers so that people can start benefiting from this technology. And so we have three asks. The first is that if you are in a position where you are hiring, we'd love to have a conversation with you. We want to talk about your hiring needs and hiring challenges and determine if and how we can support you in those. The second ask is that we are beta testing our product and if you're interested in beta testing and providing us with honest and candid feedback, we'd love to hear that because again, you really want to solve your problem. And lastly, we are piloting with a few companies and working with them closely in order to understand their challenges deeply and tailor our product to better meet their specific needs. So if you're interested in any of those three things, please shoot me an email. I would love to hear from you. Thank you.