The DonaTIC awards have celebrated their sixth edition on October 13th, coinciding with the Ada’s Lovelace anniversary, an acknowledgment for being the first women programmer in the entire world. Sandra Sans, partner in charge of the global area of infrastructure services at everis, received the award for her career and for her contribution to attracting, developing, and retaining management talent, especially among women, in the field of ICTs.
The DonaTIC awards ceremony took place at the Pedralbes Palace in Barcelona and was attended by Tertulia Digital and the Women, Business, and Economy Observatory. The awards have the two-fold objective of recognising the fundamental role of women in the professional, business, and academic world of new technologies, and to offer a reference for girls and teenagers who doubt whether or not to devote themselves to the STEM disciplines (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) in the future.
Also, the awards promote the importance of women’s access to the technological field, increase their presence, recognise the essential role of those who already belong to the ICT world and, in short, encourage participation in the construction of the digital society criteria based on equality.
The criteria chosen by the jury to select the winners is based on the candidate’s professional career, the inspiring and empowering profile of women in the ICT sector. In addition, other values are taken into consideration such as equality, equity, commitment, ethics, innovation, and research. Supporting other women in their development and helping them get visibility is another key factor.
Sandra Sans, a leader in the ICT sector
Sandra Sans’ professional career has grown exponentially since its inception; she became an everis partner at the age of 32 and has held various positions of responsibility in the organization, from the public sector to the role of BPO CEO. She is currently responsible for the Infrastructure Services business unit, a group company dedicated to data center, communications, and workplace infrastructure services. This is a global unit with a presence in Europe and Latin America with more than 2000 professionals which has been named the number one company in Spain in Outsourcing Services five consecutive times; additionally, they have been named as a reference company in the transformation of businesses to CLOUD.
However, there is one thing that Sandra has demonstrated: it is possible to attract, develop, retain, and export management talent in the field of ICTs, mainly of the female gender. She has led teams with a high percentage of diversity and decentralization (geographically located between Europe and Latin America), teams that have managed to achieve important transformation challenges within the public and private sectors.
In addition to a clear professional focus on internationalization, profitability, innovative projects, or transformation initiatives, one of Sandra’s main achievements has been to grow her teams which have reached the highest management level both within everis and in other companies.
In summary, Sandra’s main goal has been to raise awareness about the impact of gender biases and prejudices associated with the science and technology professions and, in her own words regarding this award, Sandra shares that “it is a source of pride to receive this recognition, and more importantly, that there are initiatives such as these that help fight the gender gap in ICT vocations. In this context, my dream would be to promote a #DiverseTIC movement to be a global reference for diversity in the ICT sector”.
DonaTIC Jury
As a new feature, this year the jury will have a technical committee as well as an honorary committee, with different functions. The technical committee will evaluate the entries and will choose six semi-finalists for each of the categories, and the committee of honour will select the three finalists and the winner of each category. There are seven categories of the awards: entrepreneur, businesswoman, professional, academic/researcher, disseminator, DonaTIC revelation, and ICT student.
In 2019 there were 109 entries, a figure that has more than doubled the 45 that competed in the first call for entries in 2015.
