Católica launches Women+ initiative to encourage female leadership
Universidade Católica Portuguesa has launched the Women+ initiative, a mentoring and job shadowing project that aims to inspire female leadership in young graduates. The initiative will include mentors from various sectors of society, academia and business.
"It is important to show the young graduates the experience of young leaders and to inspire them to pursue a career of service and leadership", explains Isabel Capeloa Gil. The President of Católica adds it is necessary to show these young women that "the roles are not easy, it is hard to articulate a family life and a career", but it is possible. To do so, "it's very important to have role models they can look at and follow through and learn from".
According to Isabel Capeloa Gil, the Women+ initiative aims to "further the development of women in academia, and to support, in the sense of inspiring young graduates in their future roles as professionals through examples of leadership." This new project follows several programs already structured to encourage women to develop their entrepreneurial skills at Católica.
This initiative will pair a recent graduate with a mentor for a year of mentoring. At the end of the year, the impact that the activities have had on the young woman and whether they have inspired her to take on a leadership role will be assessed.
At the Women+ kick-off lunch, on February 2, Católica hosted Sister Helen Alford OP, President of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, to share her vision and knowledge of Catholic Social Doctrine and its potential to address the difficult issues facing women today.
Pauline Nugent, Provost of the University of Notre Dame, Australia, and Lilian Ferrer, Vice President of International Affairs at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, were also present to share their personal experiences as leaders.
In her opening speech at the event, Helen Alford reflected on a life-changing experience she had as an engineering student. Reading an article about an industrial assembly line, Helen came to a conclusion that would change her life forever: "Everything we're doing is wrong. We’re designing the machines and then putting the people around the machines. We should be designing machines around people. The human being should be at the center." Since then, she has dedicated her life to addressing this issue.
For the economist, over the last 250 years the economic system has not evolved at the pace of society, with "collateral costs for women and families". Helen Alford argues that "we cannot accept this anymore , our problems are too deep, the system is too disfunctional and precisely because women are the most affected by it, they can be the leaders of change".
Pauline Nuget spoke about her personal experience. She was Provost of two Catholic universities in Australia, trained as a nurse and has a distinguished career in business. She was voted Victorian Business Woman of the Year in 2009 and has participated in numerous business leadership bodies. Despite all these qualifications, Pauline explained that in many boardrooms she wasn't always taken seriously, simply because she was a woman. She stressed the importance of having programs like this, which prepare women for all scenarios, without losing confidence in their abilities.
On this subject, Lilian Ferrer, who is responsible for SACRU's strategic initiative on gender mainstreaming in academia, emphasised the importance that other women have had in her life, encouraging her to develop her career and never give up, despite adversity.
The kick-off event was attended by Maria de Belém, former Minister of Health, Ana Costa Freitas, former Rector of the University of Évora, Céline Abecassis-Moedas, Director of Executive Education at Católica Lisbon, and Isabel Braga da Cruz, Pro-Rector of Católica, among many other prominent personalities invited to take part in this program.