ISSUE
24 May 2022
WIE - UC NEWSLETTER IEEE Student Branch of the UC Women in Engineering Affinity Group
WHAT'S INSIDE:
Interview with Ana Sanches - P. 1
Biography of Ruth Benerito - P.4
Achievement - P.5
Recipes with WiE Curiosity - P.7 P.6
ISSUE NO. 24 | MAY 2022
IEE WiE Interviews - Ana Sanches Ana Sanches is the VP of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at Teleperformance, a role which is still relatively new in Portugal. After receiving a Bachelor’s in Management at Nova School of Business and Economics, she began her career at EDP, where she worked for twelve years – first, as an Energy Planning Specialist, before ultimately becoming an HR Manager and exploring Diversity and Inclusion for the first time. Ana then went on to work at OutSystems, where she focused once again on the employees’ journey and wellbeing as a People Experience Manager. Today she works in Teleperformance Portugal to build a culture where everyone feels that they are heard, they are valued and that they belong. 1. I would like to begin by asking you to describe what your current job entails, for those who are unfamiliar. At Teleperformance being a VP of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion means fundamentally two things: that I am responsible for enabling a cultural change that brings our company as closer as possible to an inclusive workplace from different angles and perspectives, which is a never ending task because no matter what you do there is always room for improvement; that I can be the voice of our employees, especially the ones that come from underrepresented groups, bringing that voice to decision makers and leaders, making them feel accountable and empowered to lead that change. In practice, together with my internal stakeholders, I’m responsible for creating and executing an internal strategy for TP Portugal that includes several initiatives to drive that change, in the next couple of years. Our focus will be in three main pillars: awareness, empowerment and accountability. For that we will need to work alongside with leaders, change processes, educate our people and make sure that we report our main challenges and progress along the way.
2. Your career has focused much on connecting with people – when and how did you realize that that was something you are passionate about? It’s a great question. Connecting people means understanding the potential of an interaction, sometimes even before other people see it. I realized that I was meant to do that with my second role at EDP, where I was an Executive Manager for the Corporate University and that made me connect a lot of people entering the organization with others that were already inside. To do that I always needed to find the things that made them relate to each other. And that is the basis of working on Diversity and Inclusion, sharing what we have in common and bridging the gap of our differences, with consciousness and respect. Then I realized that I was doing that for most of my life, even personally. So it made sense to continue doing it on a professional level. 3. Being the VP of diversity, equity, and inclusion involves some topics that are sometimes very polarizing; have you ever faced any pushback, in that sense? Yes, I have faced pushbacks, it’s part of grtgtr PAGE 1
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having a job that drives change. My CEO told me “You are not here to make friends, you are here to drive change”. Because change is uncomfortable for many people and because the topics I touch are sometimes not well received more due to lack of awareness or knowledge than because of some kind of bad intentions. I believe people do the best they can with the information and context that they have. If we can change their mindset, educate them on topics such as unconscious bias, privilege, intersectionality or allyship, then I am sure many of them will understand that they too can be part of the change and positively impact others. 4. What made you decide to take on your current role? Have the topics it deals with always been important to you? For me it was a challenge that I could not say no to. Reporting directly to a CEO of a company with 13.000 people that truly believes on the importance of my work was key. I started my childhood on the other side of the world, in Macau, where western and eastern cultures connect and live side by side. I got to know a lot of different countries and meet so many different people that I think diversity was part of my DNA right from the start. When I came back to Portugal, I did not feel that I belonged, just because I did not look or acted like everyone else. And that made me realize that you can feel like a stranger in your own country, school or team. If people are not aware on why they need to value and respect differences, they will expect everyone to behave and look the same. And that reduces immensely the potential inside each one of us.
Then, throughout life I understood how privileged I was and how I could use my voice to stand up for others and make their voice heard. So, answering your second question, yes, I believe these topics have always been relevant to me and they are a source of personal and professional fulfillment. 5. Would you share with us some goals you might have had, when you first began working? Do you feel as if you have reached some, if not all, of them? I think that when we start to work our main goal is pretty much to learn from others, just like we did in college, but now with a much more practical and faster approach. I knew I wanted to work in areas related with People such as human resources because I was passionate about human behavior and the way I could positively impact others inside a company, with my work. Then I understood that to do that I needed to know myself better. I did several assessments, including an Enneagram test where I better understood what my essence was and how I could use it throughout life. There is one sentence that I remember from going through that process that never left my mind – understanding your purpose in life is not simple but once you have it really lights up your path. It’s like going on a car trip and entering the roadway without knowing where to go. If you don’t know where to go the signs won’t say anything to you. But if you know where you are going, let’s say to Coimbra, then you see the signs saying “Coimbra – 150km” and you know if you are getting closer and when you need to choose to cut right or left. So, finding your direction is super important.
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But I don’t expect someone starting their career with that direction, I just think that self-awareness and a constant curiosity about yourself and the world you live in will be key to getting there. Now that I’ve found my purpose, my goal is to be happy and fulfilled in my career as well as personally and I have felt that several times during my life. 6. How did your decision to participate in the PWIT mentorship program come about? What are your expectations? I love mentorship programs and I think this is one of the best ones in Portugal. Being able to support and follow the career path of someone else is a very demanding but important job. And for us women, in particular, I think we have an extra responsibility of pulling ourselves up and supporting each other. Because our path is harder and there are still many roadblocks that we need to surpass. 7. With your experience as an HR Manager, what are some tips you can share about succeeding in an interview? I don’t believe there is a magic formula. Once again knowing yourself is key, being confident about your strengths but also conscious of your main limitations. Understanding that on the other side of the conversation there can be a diversity of profiles that value different things and that says very little about YOU. You just need to find the right match with the culture that you can relate to and that will fully explore your potential. One of the things that I always suggest to students is that they take time to know the company they are applying for. dgrhr
And think about adapting their CV to match the value added that they believe they can bring, to support their application. Because it can be completely different from company to company. This is something that is super common in other countries such as the UK where you have to send a motivation letter and an adapted CV. Also always ask for feedback, if not in the moment at least as a follow-up from the interview. That will allow you to understand what the interviewer valued or not, which is a way of understanding how other people think, and you can always use that feedback for personal development, if it makes sense to you. 8. Do you have any advice on how to manage the work/life balance? I really don’t like the term work-life balance. I prefer work-life integration or blend. Because with technology, synchronous communication and the complexity that your life gets (once you have children or decide to work and study at the same time, for example) it is quite impossible to “disconnect” from one reality or the other and find a “balance”. I think we all need to find the best blend that works for us, and that can mean different things in different stages of life. Nowadays I value spending time with my kids, so I always try to make sure that I have quality time with them on a daily basis. That might mean stopping work at a certain time and then picking up on some to dos after they are asleep and that is fine by me. But it might mean something else to another person that likes to start the day early in the gym and then work until a bit later in the afternoon. rgr PAGE 3
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For it to work we just need to make sure we keep the people we work with informed and that we manage expectations (ours and our leader’s) as best as we can. I also believe that being able to put things in perspective is crucial and that brings me again to our purpose in life. If we have that clear than our work-life blend needs to derive from that. And if that is not the case than we should change, and that change starts within.
Finally, as a bit of humor …. 9. What is your favorite season of the year and why? Definitely Summer 😊 I love the heat, the beach, the number of different fruits available and it’s when I have the most time to play with my kids. Also, I love music and in summer there are many music festivals. For Summer means sunny days and joy and that fuels my energy!
Sarah Holm
Biography RUTH BENERITO Born in January 12 of 1916, Ruth Maty Rogan Benerito was an American inventor and physical chemist, most known for her work related to the textile industry. She held 55 patents. Around the 1930s and 1940s, synthetic fibers like nylon and polyester where invented. These fibers where easy to work with because there was no need to iron the fabrics. These proved to be very disadvantageous to the cotton farmers since many costumers opted for the new easy-care synthetic clothes, even though they were not as comfortable against the skin as cotton was. This is where Ruth Benerito comes in. She and her team were able to discover a method for creating not only a wrinkleresistant cotton but also stain and flame resistant, thus “saving the cotton industry”. Benerito grew up in New Orleans and both parents were college graduates and imposed their values regarding a strong sense of education and women's rights onto Ruth. After completing high school ate age 14, and at 15 she entered Sophie Newcomb College, the women’s college at Tulane University, lfkjlek
SOURCE: SCIENCEHISTORY.ORG
where she earned a degree in chemistry as well as physics and math. In 1935 she graduated and moved to Bryn Mawr College to complete a year of graduate studies. Graduating during the great Depression, Benerito hoped to do research, but jobs were scare. So, instead, she taught high school in Jefferson Parish, west of New Orleans. In addition to science and math Benerito was assigned to teach driver’s education, even though she had never driven a car. PAGE 4
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While teaching in Jefferson Parish, Ruth took night classes in order to earn her master’s degree from Tulane University. During World War II, she taught college classes, and after she earned a PhD in physical chemistry from the University of Chicago. She married Frank Benerito in 1950 and went to work at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Southern Regional Research Laboratories in New Orleans, where she spent most of her career. During the Korean War, Benerito developed a method to harvest fats from seeds for use in intravenous feeding of patients too sick to eat, a method used to feed seriously wounded soldiers. In the 1950s Benerito’s research team discovered how to treat cotton fibers so that the chainlike cellulose molecules were chemically joined. At the time, chemists knew that cellulose molecules could stick to each other by way of hydrogen bonds, but hydrogen bonds are weak and easily broken, jlkj
making cotton fabric prone to wrinkling. The new treatment strengthened the bonds between cellulose molecules by inserting short organic molecules between them rather like the rungs of a ladder. The new product was one enormous molecule with different properties from the original cellulose molecules. This “crosslinking” made cotton wrinkle resistant. Once Benerito worked out her method of attaching organic chemicals to cotton fibers, all sorts of valuable properties could be added to the fibers, such as stain and flame resistance. In the late years, while she continued her research of cotton fibers, she taught classes part time at Tulane and at the University of New Orleans. After retiring, Ruth Benerito received many awards like the Garvan Medal, the LemelsonMIT Prize and the National Inventors Hall of Fame.
Sofia Diogo
Achievement JENNIFER A. DOUDNA & EMMANUELLE CHARPENTIER
In 2020, Jennifer A. Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier were winners to The Nobel Prize in Chemistry "for the development of a method for genome editing". Born 19 February 1964, in Washington DC, USA, Doudna is the Li Ka Shing Chancellor’s Chair and a Professor in the Departments of Chemistry and of Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of California, Berkeley, SOURCE: SCIENCEHISTORY.ORG while Charpentier, born 11 December 1968, in Juvisysur-Orge, France, is Scientific and Iand Managing Director of the Max Planck Unit for the lkjlk Science of Pathogens in Berlin, an institute that she founded together with the Max Planck Society. In 2012, the two scientists developed a methodology for high precision changes to genes. Their groundbreaking development of CRISPR-Cas9 as a genome-engineering technology has kçk forever changed the course of human and agricultural genomics research, as these gene scissors can lead to new scientific discoveries, better crops and new weapons in the fight against cancer and genetic diseases.
Mariana Almeida PAGE 5
ISSUE NO. 24 | MAY 2022
Recipes with WiE: Quesadillas This is a super simple recipe that can be made in 15 minutes with leftovers. It's really customizable as well, so you can mix and match with the ingredients you have on hand. It may not be "authentic", but it sure is tasty!
INGREDIENTS Protein
of
choice:
You
can
use
leftover
chicken,
bacon,
black
beans, etc; Vegetables of choice: Onion, peppers, and tomatoes are my favorite veggies, but go wild! Flour tortillas; Cheese: I use grated mozzarella because it melts really nicely; once again, it's up to your personal preferences; Butter or oil (to fry up the quesadillas).
INSTRUCTIONS 1. Start by prepping your vegetables and protein of choice. 2. Build your quesadillas by placing cheese on one half of the tortilla, then your veggies and protein on top, and finish with another layer of cheese. Fold the tortilla in half, bare half over the half you just covered in toppings. 3. In a pan, heat butter or oil (if you cooked up some bacon, use the remaining fat!) and add the quesadillas. Cook for a few minutes on each side, or until the cheese has melted and the tortillas have toasted nicely. 4. Enjoy!
Sarah Holm PAGE 6
ISSUE NO. 24 | MAY 2022
Curiosity of the month... Do you know who the first woman to discover a comet was? Caroline Herschel, born in Hannover, Germany in 1750, was a pioneer in the field of astronomy, and widely regarded as the first professional female astronomer. At first, when she joined her brother William in the English city of Bath, her goal was to become a singer – but soon after he was employed by king George III as court astronomer, she began aiding him in his research. Between the two siblings, they were able to record around 2,500 new nebulae and star clusters, creating the basis for the New General Catalog, the NGC notation by which these celestial bodies are named to this day.
SOURCE: WIKIPEDIA.ORG
Between 1786 and 1797, she discovered eight comets, the first of which on August the first while her brother was away and she was using his telescope. In 1987, King George III awarded Caroline an annual pension of £50 (around £6,500 in 2022), making her the first woman in England to hold an official government position, as well as the first woman to be paid for her work in astronomy. Following her brother’s passing in 1822, Caroline returned to Hannover, where she would complete the cataloging of every discover made by her and William – around 2,500 nebulae, and many star clusters. Two of the astronomical catalogs published by Caroline Herschel are still in use today.
Sarah Holm
F O L L O W
S T A Y
O U R
T U N E D
A N D
S O C I A L
T O
O U R
M E D I A
T O
E V E N T S
P O S T S !
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Solution
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Hope you have a great
Queima das Fitas! See You Next Month!
ISSUE NO. 24 | MAY 2022