Laboratoria’s Mariana Costa Empowers Women in Tech

In shaping her career, Peru native Mariana Costa has asked herself a question: What can I do to make life better for women in Latin America? The answer she landed on was training them for tech jobs. Mariana Costa Employer Laboratoria Title Co-founder and president Alma Maters London School of Economics; Columbia Such positions pay well and are in demand. And for too long, women across the region have been locked out of them, she says. Costa is president of Laboratoria, a U.S.-registered nonprofit based in Miami that she helped found. Laboratoria has trained thousands of women in 11 Latin American countries for technology careers. She has built training centers in the countries and has placed graduates at major companies. Meanwhile, she has become one of the most recognized voices in the region on workforce equity and tech education for women. IEEE recognized her work with its President’s Award this year for her “distinguished leadership and contributions to the betterment of society.” Recipients of the award are selected by the IEEE president with the consent of the IEEE Board of Directors. Costa says the recognition came as a surprise because she is not an engineer by training and had never considered becoming affiliated with IEEE. She was presented with the award at the IEEE Honors Ceremony on 24 April in New York City. Peru: a country of contrasts Costa grew up in Lima, Peru’s capital, in a household with no connection to engineering or technology. Her mother was an art historian and professor, and her father was a lawyer. The family was financially comfortable and traveled abroad regularly. Costa attended well-resourced schools. That economic stability came with a reckoning, Costa says, in that she recognized early on that economic inequality had created separate societies inside Peru. Her parents, she says, made it “clear that my reality wasn’t the reality of most people in my country.” Lima is a microcosm of the country, she says. The divide in the capital city is visible: A kilometers-long concrete wall topped with barbed wire separates wealthier neighborhoods from shantytowns, where residents lack running water. Nationally, there are splits along ethnic and geographic lines. The highland and jungle regions remain home to mostly indigenous communities with limited educational access and a deep cultural distance from the Hispanic-dominated coast. The questions that stirred in her as a child never left, she says. “Why do I live in a country where so much depends on where you’re born?” she asked herself. “What does it mean to be Peruvian when individual realities are strikingly different?” Those questions followed her to the London School of Economics, where she studied international relations, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in 2007. She held onto the questions when she moved to Washington, D.C., where she spent the next four years working for the Organization of American States, helping Latin American governments improve public services that fall under the heading of civil registration. “I said, ‘How can it be? The tech space has so many rich opportunities. Why aren’t any women here?’” The OAS Universal Civil Identity Program in the Americas provides technical support to national civil registry institutions, modernizing them to foster social inclusion and ensuring the right to civil identity for all people. Without civil identity, a person can’t access education, health care, legal employment, social services, or the right to vote. People without the classification don’t exist in the eyes of the government. They also can’t own property, get married officially, or pass citizenship rights to their children. Doing that work deepened her concern about the socioeconomic disparities in her homeland, she says. In search of practical solutions to those problems, she went to New York City in 2011 to further her education. She earned a master’s degree in public administration and development from Columbia in 2013. Technology was not yet part of a solution. But Costa already had met someone who would change that. Falling in love with a programmer While working in Washington, Costa met Herman Marìn, a software engineer who used digital tools in support of social causes. Because he was doing work she had never associated with programmers before, her assumptions about the field dissolved quickly. “I had a vision of [programmers doing] something not very social—strictly technical,” she says. “And my then-boyfriend, now husband, actually worked for different social movements that used technology to address social causes.” That realization cracked something open, she says: “I said, ‘Oh! Technology can actually be a tool to address some of the more stubborn problems in our societies.’” After earning her degree at Columbia, Costa returned to Lima with her husband. She had been abroad for nearly a decade and felt the pull of home. “The thought of not moving back to my country was something that tormented me a bi

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