Speaker: Mary Piverger, Executive Assistant, BANYAN
Why is Women’s History Month important to you? How are you celebrating?
Mary Piverger: Hi. I'm Mary Piverger from BANYAN and Women's History Month is important to me because just in my lifespan I have seen so much progress we made for women, um, and I'm excited to see the strides that we continue to take and the progress that will be made in the future. And um, I am celebrating Women's History Month by continuing to raise a very strong and confident, empathetic but strong and confident daughter, as well as a son who is respectful and knows when to listen.
2022's International Women's Day theme is #BreakTheBias. Can you speak to biases we can work to break in our communities and/or workplaces?
Mary Piverger: I think that most people are guilty of having bias, whether subconsciously or consciously towards someone else in the workplace, and I'll speak for myself. I think sometimes I do have a tendency of thinking that I know what a persons like via Slack or email and having kind of a preconceived notion of how they're going to behave in in person. And a lot of times that's wrong. So for me personally, I'm trying to break the bias of judging someone else by the way that they communicate on email and giving people the benefit of the doubt.
What advice would you give to the next generation of women as they begin their careers?
Mary Piverger: Actually, in my experience, I have noticed that the younger generation of women tends to be way more confident and self assured in their abilities in the workplace than the women of my generation. And I love to see that, and I hope it continues on and on and on. And I think that that probably has a lot to do with the progress that we have made as women and the opportunities that women are seeing more so in the workplace than we did in the past. And I really have been very proud to see the younger generations of women come up and be so self assured and confident in their abilities and um take on projects and take on new responsibilities and lead up teams and just feel more confident in the workplace.
