This week, for our first ever live recording of our Woman of the Week episodes, we were joined by Robbie Ropella, President of the Ropella Group. The Ropella Group is a leading executive search and consulting firm specializing in the chemical industry. She jokes that she married into the chemical industry by meeting and marrying her husband, Pat Ropella who founded Ropella Group. Robbie started off answering phones and worked her way from the ground up in their recruiting business. Robbie mainly places mid-level to C-suite candidates.

Mayra holds a tremendously unique background. Born in the Brazilian countryside, Mayra was motivated and self-driven to relocate to the busy city of Rio De Janeiro for her undergrad, where she studied International Trade. Mayra relocated once more to the UK to pursue her MBA. Shortly thereafter she began working in Belgium, mostly in customs and trade work, and now trade policy at Solvay.

Mariane joins us from a new role with Celanese, working as their Global Ethylene Sourcing Director. Prior to Celanese, Mariane carries with her a diverse background of roles within ExxonMobil and LyondellBasell. Mariane talked to us about how different the chemicals industry is than what those outside of the industry think it might be. She emphasized how women bring a different perspective to the industry than our counterparts.

Christi currently works as Jungbunzlauer (JBL) Regional Sales Manager. Christi shared with us how she "stumbled into the industry", like many of our WIC members. We talked a lot about creating engagement, awareness, and visibility for women to enter the industry with Christi, and how it "needs to start from the ground up" at colleges and universities.

Brittany shared with us how she entered the Chemicals Industry by "happy accident" as an intern at Sea-Land. Today, she is able to apply her marketing degree and minor in Biology while also pursuing other goals of mentorship and advocating for women in the industry by speaking at schools.

Nicole describes her career journey to ultimately landing as the Counsel at Wego Chemical, her family business. She discusses finding balance in her personal and professional lives managing both her career and being a mother of three. This episode is a special edition episode to announce that Women in Chemicals received their 501(c)3 determination of which Nicole championed.

Gayle walks us through how she found her way to Royal Chemical following her previous employer moving her schedule to an unpractical swing shift while she was raising her two young sons. She touches on all the various roles she has held at Royal Chemical including plant manager, quality assurance representative, and sales woman and the unique challenges each role held.

Victoria shares all the decision points in her career journey that led her from her chemical engineering background through various roles in the chemical industry, back to school to pursue her MBA, her time in Shell's MBA development program, and finally starting her own consulting company Progressio Global in 2017.

Andi shared with us how she grew up in the chemical industry with her father founding Chem/Serv Inc. when she was a child. Starting her career selling janitorial chemicals at State Chemical in Miami, Andi then moved on to a job selling fish and seafood before finally ending up back at her family business managing operations and regulatory.

In this episode, Lauren tells us about her experience working in marketing and advertising prior to joining BluePallet, discusses BluePallet's core values including promoting diversity and why as an organization they wanted to partner with and support WIC, and the teaches us the power of saying no and letting it linger in professional settings.

Chelsea shared with us her unique path pivoting from her computer science and engineering background to procurement in the chemical industry. In our conversation, we discussed the differences in gender dynamics in varying geographies touching on Chelsea's experiences growing up in India. Chelsea encouraged us to prioritize connecting with others and to have confidence in our contributions to our organizations.

Michele shared with us how she focuses on incremental improvement everyday for her professional development, how she manages to maintain her personal life despite continuous work responsibilities, and she advised us all to get outside of our comfort zone in our lives.