Well, Feature Fridays have been on a bit of a hiatus! But I’m happy to be back with more interviews with women from around the world in 2024.
Ever since the idea for Feature Fridays was born I’ve wanted to interview Mary - for many reasons, the biggest being she’s the most self-realized person I know. From growing a beautiful family to (literally) chasing her goals as an athlete to building an international career - I wanted to get Mary’s perspective on life and how she makes it all happen.
Mary Wieder is an Italian-American based in Verona, Italy. She’s spent the past 16+ years developing an international marketing career, including her own consulting business - M7 Social Project. Mary is also a university lecturer teaching International Marketing and Business Communications. She is the founder of the Verona Professional Women Networking group and an advocate for women’s rights and empowerment. Mary is an athlete, a partner to her husband Gio, and a mother to two boys.
Read, and listen to, our interview below.
What has being a lifelong athlete brought to your life?
I think for most of my life, that's how I was defined - as an athlete. I started playing sports when I was four or five and played just about every sport that you can throw in front of a kid until I got to high school and then university and focused on one - which was softball.
Being an athlete has opened a lot of doors in my life. And it has given me a lot of skill sets and experiences that I need in other aspects of my life.
I also reached a point when I was in university where I noticed people, friends, and family, didn't even care about how I performed academically, because I played a Division One sport. And I was like, you know - I'm also studying business.
Being an athlete, and my athletic experience was also something that got me to Italy. I came here to play semi-professional softball after I graduated college. It was something that opened a door here. So when I gave it up, I think I was 29 or 30, I needed to keep moving.
I need to do something athletic, something competitive. I tried my hand at running. At first, I thought I'll see if I can run more than 5K. And I entered a race just for fun, a half marathon and kind of fell in love with the sport and still do it today, which led me to my first marathon back in November.
I decided - why not do the biggest marathon in the world? The New York City Marathon.
When you've played at a very competitive level and it's something that's dominated most of your life, I think it teaches you. It's definitely taught me a lot of skills like time management, and prioritization. I played a team sport, so working well with others, teamwork, team building, and a sense of commitment and dedication to something for sure. And discipline. When I was in college, it was practicing four days a week and playing two days a week. And now I run four to five times a week, so a lot of it is discipline.
And probably competition. Healthy competition anyway. It’s the idea that you're always competing, but in a healthy way.
How do you manage your career and being a Mom?
It’s a huge challenge. Because your children are your number one priority. At the same time, it's always been important to me to have my own economic independence, and work, and build a career.
I made the choice when I had both my children to not take a lot of time off work with both of them. I worked right up until it was time. It was just a choice. I felt that if I kept my mind busy I’d keep my mind off of worrying about giving birth. And I returned to work shortly after with both - I'm talking five, six weeks. But that was a choice as well because my career was very important and I tried to balance that as best as I could.
And now they're a little bit older, they're six and three, but now they come with a different set of priorities. You’ve got to stay behind their schoolwork, they're starting to play sports as well.
Being able to manage it - first, you have to be dedicated to it. You have to have passion for your job and whatever else you do. You have to find balance and know that your priorities might change from day to day. There are days when you have a really important work meeting, and it's not saying your kids aren't a priority, but if everything's running smoothly, you give your time to work and then there are days that you dedicate to your kids and they have the priority that day.
It's hard at times when they're sick or when they have things. I think where maybe I've been lucky, I don't know if you want to call it luck, is that my husband and I are co-parents. I think you need a supportive partner and maybe supportive is not even the right word.
One thing I always said is I want my kids to see us both as workers and both as parents. I don't want them to see one as a priority parent and one as a priority worker. So that's always been our goal. We co-parent and we co-work, everything is 50/50. There are days when I pick up the slack around the house and there are days that he picks it up.
Having a supportive work environment is important. I've had cases where the work environment wasn't supportive. Underhanded comments about having to attend to my children or not wanting to stay in the office until eight or nine o 'clock at night, because I wanted to get home to my kids.
But I've also been in work situations where people understand. And you can have an open conversation with your boss, and your colleagues, about your kids. I've had both situations. I've had companies where I've been afraid to talk about my kids and been in situations where I openly talk about it - you know, today my kid has a doctor's appointment or today I have to take a half an hour and go to a teacher conference.
When you have a supportive household and you have a work environment that understands it, obviously you can manage it much better.
You also have to have the drive to be able to manage it. Unfortunately, I've seen a lot of women drop out of the workforce. Some not by choice. Some because the work environment has made it very difficult for them to take care of their children and work. Some because the cost of daycare outweighs the benefits of going to work. And some do it by choice because they, you know, they, they prefer to be home with their children.
And for me, it's just a matter of: are you free to choose what you want to do when it comes to your kids and your career?
Why is women’s equality work so important, from your perspective?
The issue of gender equality has been very important to me over the last decade as I’ve kind of struggled to manage motherhood and a career. When I say the freedom to choose, we kind of take it for granted because we live, let's say, in free societies or countries where people have the right to choose what they want to do.
And unfortunately, it really isn't the case everywhere. When we look at statistics and we look at the number of women in the workforce, I'm here in Italy where it's around 49-50% of women in the workforce. That's astonishing. One in two women that you talk to are not employed. When you look at how many are employed full-time, the number just diminishes.
What that links to is: I went to this conference in Rome on Monday and one of the astonishing facts that was presented was that gender-based violence and murder, femicide, increased by 5% in Italy last year.
In 2023, there were more deaths of women by their partners than the year before. The statistic that came after that was that almost 87% of physical violence cases against women are a result of economic violence.
Women don't have a choice to leave a bad situation. They don't work or they don't make enough to maintain themselves economically. So they can't leave the situation. They can't find another place to stay. Their partner controls the finances or their partner controls the bank account. I even learned recently that one in three women in Italy does not even have a bank account with their name attached to it.
How can you be free to make a choice about whether you work, where you work, how long you work - when you aren't economically independent to do so? And this is a major, major problem. So how do we get more women in the workforce?
A lot of countries continue to complain as well that we're not having enough children. and the birth rate is dropping. And in Italy, it's now around one. And they want to know why. And the reason is, we know how much it costs to support children today. Like I said before, some women are dropping out of the workforce because they basically are working to pay for the daycare. So they say, what's the point in spending time away from my child, enrolling them in a daycare when I can just stay home? But that also makes this woman now dependent on somebody else. And so a lot of people get stuck in bad situations.
They don't have the economic independence to have a choice. I'm not going to sit here and tell you that I have an answer because this is what governments and institutions are working on today. A couple of the arguments on the table here are you have to educate people. You have to educate when they're children, from preschool, elementary school - with the type of language that you use, start putting financial education in the curriculum at the middle school and high school level so people know how to open a bank account. They know how to save money. They know what a savings account is. It's already difficult to invest and do all of those things, but a simple thing like how does a paycheck work? What are the numbers on your paycheck? What are you entitled to? These types of things that a lot of women, unfortunately, don't know. And some of it's cultural, but some of it, we can start to take control of.
Companies are also stakeholders in this because we need more gender equality in the workforce. We need more women in management and executive positions because when they're in those positions they grow diversity and inclusion in companies, which allows more women in the workforce. And this in turn creates more empowerment in society.
And part of it is also the cultural mentality and making sure that women have a choice, which unfortunately a lot don't today.
What does freedom mean to you, or what are moments when you’ve felt free?
I think for me the definition of freedom, at least for me, is pretty simple.
It's when you have a choice. If you can't choose the situation you want to live in, if you can't choose something that makes you happy, and I'm not saying that you have to be happy 24 hours a day, seven days a week - but you should at least be serene.
You should at least be satisfied and content with the choices that you've made and the life that you're currently living. I've definitely had moments where I felt less freedom because I felt like I couldn't leave a bad work situation because I needed the income.
I personally have always said that I didn't want to rely on anybody else. So I didn't want to quit and rely on my husband. I was like, no, I always need to have my income.
So sometimes I found myself in a job where I felt a little bit trapped. Sometimes I've seen for other women, when you have kids you can feel very trapped in the home as well. Because obviously, you dedicate a lot of time, you dedicate a lot of priority to your children. You might not feel as free to maybe live the life you once had. I think this is something I think women struggle with a lot and they don't really talk about.
I know it's part of it is postpartum, when your life basically flips upside down and now you're responsible for another human being. But I think sometimes it makes you feel a little trapped in that aspect as well.
Freedom is always being able to have some kind of choice to change what you're currently doing and try to make your life a little bit better, the way that you want to live it. To me, that's what freedom is.
I've been pretty lucky that I typically have found that I do have a choice in what I can do. Like I said, not all women do, especially if you're not economically independent to make some kind of choice.
But I think that's what it boils down to. If you don't have a choice in anything, you're not really free.
Do you have any resources you recommend? Books etc.
What I try to read on a consistent basis is The Economist. I still think it's one of the only news sources that has remained fairly neutral in just reporting the news and getting an overall picture of what's going on in the world. Unfortunately, I don't have a lot of time to listen to podcasts, but I would say over the last two years, I've read two interesting books on money.
One is called You Are a Badass at Making Money. I think the author's name is Jennifer Sincero. She talks about as women how we need to change our relationship with money.
The other one - I forget the specific title - is something like Broke Millennial Takes On Investing. It was kind of a quick and easy guide to investing. If you have a little bit of savings you can start to grow that savings. Anything on financial education - I think is very useful today.
What I've been trying to do in the last couple of years is just read in general. Just keep reading, even if it's a novel. I try to take a break during the summer, during the holiday period, and read something like a fiction novel. Something that's maybe a little bit lighter, but my goal is just to continuously read and build my knowledge base.
I enjoyed listening to Mary's perspective. Bravo, for being way ahead of, say women of my age. Not all, but most of the woman I grew up with this was a concept we learned later in life. Independance and money do go together it is just a practical way of thinking. I have this conversation often with a close friend of mine why isn't this taught in school. I still run into young woman that do not have this concept of their own financial freedom. There is nothing wrong with a partnership, it can make you stronger, but what happens if the partnership is dissolved? Thank you for sharing.