Is Thinking about Happiness Futile?
I have always thought that professional women awards some how proved themselves that there are not equal opportunities for women; they recognize women that excel professionally while men aren´t recognized for the same achievements. This could be titled as unfare but with the lens of age I have changed my point of view and I think that the main objective of the awards is just to make women talent visible, being a mere instrument for creating awareness on the great community of women professionals and inspiring others to embrace technology careers. Society is short of STEM professional, as the most demanded profile and with the highest growth of employment in the following years. We cannot afford to loose 50% of the talent just due to gender, therefore it is a social responsibility to promote and foster women into STEM that I support proactively with different initiatives. Let me share with you the last one.
One week ago I have the honor to be jury of the GLOBANT AWARDS – WOMEN THAT BUILD for the European region, to recognize women in technology. Sponsored by IE Spain in collaboration with the IE School of Human Sciences and Technology as these initiative is totally aligned with our core values to foster and promote women education into technology careers. The selected category for the sponsorship was the ´Game Changer’ , to distinguish women in top leadership roles and without formal training in STEM who has made an impact in IT industry. This award went to Patricia Benito, OPENBANK General Manager. She is a strong believer on equal opportunities and has proven to embrace gender diversity as part of her leadership. She deployed the policy of gender parity at candidate selection processes for new roles, which has resulted in 54% of women in senior management positions at the bank she leads. As well she has proactively managed the gender pay gap that today is favorable to women in 3%. Patricia is a role model to other women, and proves that there is place for us to succeed in technology careers.
About the author
Araceli Garcia is Ingeniero Superior de Telecomunicaciones, by Universidad Politecnica at Madrid (Spain). She worked in the R&D Center of Ericsson at Madrid for 5 years, in the development of the mobile telephony HLR product. She joined Vodafone to launch their mobile telephony service in Spain where she occupied different leadership positions within the Technology area such as Network Director and CIO; she was also member of the Group IT committee driving the globalization across the different countries. In 2012 Araceli joined Telefonica as Global Cloud Services Director where she defined and launched the operations of their Tier IV data center as well as the operations of their internal cloud, providing services to all the companies of the group. In 2016 she joined IAG to lead Group IT services in Iberia and to support the transformation of the local team to a global and distributed organization with an important plan ahead to modernize and digitalize their business. Araceli’s key areas of expertise are technology management and IT transformation with strong experience in leading multinational organizations and multicultural teams. She is currently Academic Director of the Master in Computer Science and Business Technology at HSC IE in Madrid.
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