This International Women’s Day, the United Nations recalls the importance of digital transformation to achieve gender equality, Sustainable Development Goal No. 5. With the motto ‘For an inclusive digital world: Innovation and technology for gender equality’, the UN invites the entire world to reflect and act to reduce gender gaps and to use the transformative power of digital technology in order to build and enjoy greater well-being.

“Being at the center of the call for this International Women’s Day is a great responsibility for a company like Connectis. Although digital transformation is in our essence, our purpose is people and their well-being”, says Elisabete Mleczak, Director and Vice President of Connectis LATAM. “We are reducing the gap in the participation of women in the industry and we are also making progress in building a digital world that does not reproduce the biases of the offline world. But every day we must remember this responsibility because there is still a lot of work to be done”.

According to the UN Women’s Gender Snapshot 2022 report, the exclusion of women from the digital world has cut $1 trillion from the gross domestic product of low- and middle-income countries in the past decade. And according to the study ‘Women in the digital Age’ carried out in the European Union, incorporating more women into digital jobs would have a benefit for the economy of up to 16 trillion euros per year for GDP.

“When I started working in the IT industry several years ago, you didn’t find so many women. Today, I can say that reality has changed for the better”, says Iván Molero, Financial Director at Connectis Latam. I am convinced that gender complementarity is key to facing both the internal challenges of companies and growth objectives. I have lived it and I witness how women bring a different approach, new questions and other ways of relating and communicating. Their contribution is key to improving decision-making processes. Diverse teams are more creative and more resilient because they are better prepared to respond to a diverse and changing world.”

In Latin America and the world, there is a significant difference in the participation of men and women in the different training areas. Women are underrepresented in what are known as STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) careers from enrollment to graduation. These gaps affect not only the economy of families but also the sustainability of companies since studies show how the incorporation of women also improves innovation. IDB studies, for example, show that companies with greater diversity in their teams are more productive.

For Noemi Sakitani, Director of Human Resources for Latin America, the role of her area is key to ensuring the incorporation and retention of female talent. “It is very important to take into account the historical cultural biases that are present in our societies, especially in technical and scientific areas. For this reason, on the one hand, we have to be very careful in the selection criteria to ensure that preconceived ideas or unconscious biases are not applied. On the other hand, we must also be attentive to the different realities that our collaborators experience to attend, for example, to the concerns of many professionals who take on the tasks of caring for their children or their elders and thus retain their talent”.

Committed to bringing women into the industry – and aware of the benefits this brings to the organization, clients and the region as a whole – Connectis is actively working to increase female participation. In the Connectis Latam workforce as a whole, at the end of 2022, women represent 28.5% of collaborators, which represents a growth of 9.2% in relation to the previous year.

Latin America is one of the regions with the smallest digital access gap. The challenge for Latam is to broaden the gender perspective to the entire industry since half of the technology users are women. This is crucial for designing cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, and machine learning strategies—whether public or private corporations.

“At Connectis, we work with the idea that technology is a means to achieve greater well-being for all. It is the responsibility of all of us who are in the digital world to seek the best conditions for this and I believe that at Connectis we are moving forward with this commitment”, summarizes Elisabete Mleczak.