Celebrating International Women’s Day recalling our Equality Plan

An ambassador, a supplier and a member of the Conference Centre team tell us their experiences about equality in their fields of work.

In 2020, the team added the launch of our Equality Plan to our portfolio of experiences and significant challenges. Today, on International Women’s Day, the project is especially relevant given that it is an initiative that benchmarks equal opportunities and eradicates all types of discrimination.

With a view to adding our voice to this celebration, an ambassador, a supplier and a colleague from the Conference Centre have stepped up to tell us first-hand how equality has progressed in their field of work.

First, we talked to our ambassador Marisa Blasco, Head of the Intensive Care Department at the Clínico Hospital in Valencia, who has been on the front line since the beginning of the pandemic.

“In short, I would say that we have made enough progress to know that it is not enough. Although things have changed over the course of my career (there are now more women in my specialist area), there are still differences in certain fields, and this is especially the case in management positions. I think that there is still a need for major cultural changes in the grassroots of education, so that it is not unheard of to find women that are driven and intent on following their desired career path.”

For her part, Sonia Donet, who is a Technical Manager, a position traditionally held by men, in the Water–Legionnaire’s Disease Control Department at Compañía de Tratamientos Levante (CTL), one of the Conference Centre’s strategic partners, explains that “operators are still mainly male though there are equal numbers of men and women working as technical managers.”  Donet believes that “although the pest control and environmental health sector is still a predominantly male profession, considerable progress has been made in the last 20 years.”

We have also put the spotlight on members of the Conference Centre staff. Mónica Lull, a Congress Manager in the Operations Area, a department that has a balanced number of women and men, says “equality has always been part of our work, from our philosophy to the way we develop and run all the areas of the Centre.”

The team continues to make progress this year in implementing the Equality Plan, with the aim of promoting a future without stereotypes and with shared responsibility between men and women.