Today’s episode of Changing the game was special not only because it was my first ever international interview, but also because I got to talk to Dinia Monge, Co-Founder of Ola Igualdad and a long-time friend of mine.
Ola Igualdad is a consultancy firm created with the sole mission of promoting gender equality in different organizations, while aiding them in achieving greater efficiency and effectiveness with their work.
On a more personal level, Dinia is moved by a strong desire to change the game for women around the world that stems from her own experience with the wall of prejudice that keeps women from ascending to high positions within the corporate world.
“Five years ago, something happened”, Dinia began to explain while talking about her trajectory and how she found herself at a point in her life where it was getting difficult to balance her family life with a job that demanded bi-monthly international flights.
She recalls trying to negotiate this routine with her boss at first, who despite being very comprehensive could only do so much, eventually Dinia began to question herself on whether her current occupation was “close to her heart”.
The answer was no, and in what she called an unusually irrational decision, she quit her job in order to find a greater balance between personal and professional.
For all intents and purposes, this was leap of faith, a jump that combined the exhilarating freedom of freeing oneself from a burden combined with the spine tingling fear that comes with the lack of a safety net.
And much like any other leap of faith, Dinia was bound to land at an important conclusion that revealed her true motivation.
“I wanted to help other women get that balance. Why couldn’t you really pursue a professional life and also be at comfort with yourself and how you are dealing with time management around family.”
This motivation would eventually lead her into contacting the delicate threads of gender equality in organizations in general and collaborate in the founding of “Ola Igualdad”.
Going back on our conversation a bit, some of the more long-term members of my audience may know that one of the biggest focuses of interest at Changing the game is the extremely important subject of women in STEM.
Thus, learning that Dinia originally graduated in engineering and how extraordinary this is in terms of what it means for the struggle for a more equitable society, I just had to ask what her motivation was to choose that field.
“I love math” she responded.
This love of math, combined with being “generally unaware of all the possibilities that math implies” led her to choose between becoming an engineer or an economist, until a certain prominent figure told her:
“If you’d like for your opinions to be heard, don’t become an economist”
And out of a desire to see her work produce solid, measurable outcomes, she became an engineer.
Now, if Dinia was able to make such a big difference in the world without being initially aware of all the paths opened for her by her inclination towards numbers, imagine what young girls today can do if they receive access to this information?
At first, what made Dinia choose Brazil, my home country, as her destination after graduating from college instead of somewhere like the US or Australia was a general fascination for the Portuguese language.
Even if her first contact with the inhabitants of Rio de Janeiro was a little frightening at first.
This initial fright came more from the unexpected variance in regional dialects in Brazil, but once that barrier was overcome, Dinia tells that she quickly became a Brazilian at heart, fully immersing herself in the culture and...
