Season 1, Episode 1

Micaela Drieberg

CEO of Gender Equity Victoria

Guest biography

Micaela Drieberg is the Chief Executive Office at Gender Equity Victoria. A committed feminist, she’s a strategic, collaborative leader, with over 20 years of experience across the for-purpose sector, including across three levels of government, university, not-for-profits and peak bodies. She’s also previously served as a mayor and ministerial advisor, and most recently was the head of government relations and partnerships for a national community organisation.

Key concepts mentioned in Micaela's interview

• Health promotion: Health promotion is the process of enabling people to take control over, and improve their health.
• Personal vs professional development: Professional development is working to upskill or improve your performance in your job role or career path. Personal development helps you understand your strengths and weaknesses, motivations and values. It can help build your social, emotional and intellectual wellbeing, and may improve your ability to lead in the workplace.
• Strategy and vision: An organisational strategy verbalises the organisation’s unique value and sets shared goals and strategies that drive core business functions like hiring decisions and future growth. It helps the organisation reach its vision, which is what the organisation aspires to be in future. A vision statement provides direction, purpose, motivation and inspiration to achieve the desired outcome.
• For-purpose sector: For-purpose organisations are those working towards a common goal for society, with an aim that goes beyond driving profits.
• Intersectionality: A view that understands that health is shaped by complex and overlapping factors including education, age, race, class, income, sexual orientation, ability, ethnicity, and geography, among other factors.

Why Micaela thinks health promotion is great

It’s focused on prevention, rather than treatment. It’s looking at where we live, where we work, where we play and where we learn, and thinking about how those settings contribute to poor health, and how we can fix the root problems.

Health promotion can be applied to a wide range of jobs. Micaela has applied it to her work in government (helping deliver tobacco-free playgrounds legislation), and to her current role where she works to improve the visibility and empowerment of women in society.

Top tips for students

• Be prepared for University to be different to high school – you need to take a lot more personal responsibility for your learning, and be a self-motivated learner.
• Invest in personal development, not just professional development. Understand your strengths and what motivates you, and harness those to be immediately successful. Identify your weaknesses and spend time improving on them.
• Being able to approach strangers confidently and have a chat is an interpersonal skill that will stand you in good stead across job-seeking, and then succeeding in any job. Soft skills like verbal communication and interaction, time management, problem solving, leadership skills are invaluable.
• Get your hands dirty. If you are in a leadership position, chip in and help those working with and for you with practical tasks, and help develop their own leadership capacity.
• Believe in yourself, and be flexible and open to saying yes to opportunities that come your way. If you have the chance of undertaking an overseas experience, it’s a wonderful way to learn about foreign cultures and add depth to your work and interactions with others.

Micaela's recommendations

• Watch the movie Battle of the Sexes about sexism in the professional tennis world in the 1970s.
• Read Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men by Caroline Criado Perez.
• Check out the Put Her Name on It project at GenVIC.

Episode sponsors