“I like how you work. If you have to climb onto a transformer, you will, right?”

Eva Pagán remembers the question asked by her boss during the interview before hiring her. "The man who hired me, in 1995 after a year as an intern in his department, was way ahead of his time in terms of diversity," she says. If it were not for him, I surely would not have been  leading Red Eléctrica’s Transmission Division since 2015, a task that is not trivial: 900 people work in this area of ​​the Company which is responsible for the design, construction and maintenance of high-voltage infrastructure.

She liked machines and electronics, so she didn't think twice: she signed her first contract and, seven years later, went on to coordinate a Substation Maintenance team as the Head of Service. This first promotion also coincided with her becoming a mother for the first time and helped disprove the notion that the professional commitment of women is less than that of men.

Furthermore, although the professional respect shown by her work colleagues was ‘total’, in the working groups and international forums she took part in she felt ‘totally alone’ due to the lack of presence of female talent.

In this regard, Eva believes that we must keep moving forward, it is necessary to “give more training and more self-confidence to female professionals” so that they can achieve their goals. On some occasions, she adds, it has been difficult to convince a candidate for promotion to actually accept the promotion offered. "I have had positions of responsibility and I have also had children because in addition to being a mother, I wanted to be many other things too," she concludes.


Women at Red Eléctrica represent...