Why do we call the Men’s World Cup in soccer just “The World Cup” and for women, it is the “Women’s World Cup”? Why is the NBA —the National Basketball League—just for men, and the one for women is the “WNBA.”? People think they are an add on…a niche market…But, they would be wrong. What would happen if we thought about women’s sports and women in sports as equally valuable as men?  In this episode, we are going to hear from two accomplished entrepreneurs, Meghan Chayka and Jacie De Hoop, on what using a gender lens in sports analytics might do. 

Featured guests: 

Meghan Chayka is co-founder of Stathletes, a sports analytics and insights business that provides industry leading data precision within the sport of hockey. Meghan was named in the 2018/2019 season Top Young Entrepreneur of the Year by the Ontario Chamber of Commerce, Top 40 under 40 by the Athletic NHL, and the Top 100 of Power & Influence by Hockey News. At the Rotman School, she plays a key role in shaping the data science education and research through her work at the TD Management Data and Analytics Lab.  

Jacie De Hoop is a co-founder and head of revenue at The GIST, a sports media startup that makes sports more accessible and inclusive to all sports fans. She leads the company’s revenue generation, growing revenue from $100K to over $2.5M in 18 months through partnerships with Under Armour, the NBA and FanDuel. Jacie and her team were named to Forbes 30 Under 30 Media 2020 and have been accelerated through programs with Facebook, Comcast NBCUniversal and Techstars. GATE wrote a case study on The GIST which we’ll post in the show notes.  

Moderator: Adil Sethi is Senior Manager of Business and Content Strategy at Bell Media. As a former professional athlete himself, his experiences include franchise and athlete management, sports marketing and more recently plying his trade in the sports betting and online gaming industry. Adil has been an ardent advocate of equality in sports. It was his time as a sports agent to some of India’s top women athletes—when he witnessed first-hand, gender-based discrimination and disparity in the sports industry—that gave rise to his research, as a GATE MBA Fellow, that focused on assessing the biases that exist around corporate sponsorship in women’s sports and how they can be overcome.    

Gender Analytics is a way to analyze your products, services, processes and policies with a gender lens to uncover hidden opportunities for innovation and improved effectiveness by considering gender, race, Indigeneity, disability, ethnicity, sexual orientation and other identities. Learn more here: www.genderanalytics.org  

 

Want to hear more from the Institute for Gender and the Economy? Check out our signature podcast series, Busted, which busts prominent myths about gender and the economy! 

 

Produced by: Sarah Kaplan, Lechin Lu and Carmina Ravanera  

Edited by: Ian Gormely