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Women in science and tech.
Each partner of the CONSOLE Project actively promotes gender balance and equal opportunities for women in science and technology. This is why each issue of the CONSOLE Newsletter will include a section on Women in science and tech. Our next guest is Esther GARRIDO.
What inspired you to pursue a career in cybersecurity and software development, and please name one significant challenge you have faced as a woman in this field?
I actually didn’t start in cybersecurity; I’m a telecommunications engineer with 25 years of experience in the IT sector. I arrived here through EU-funded projects like CONSOLE.
What truly motivates me today is the fully connected future we are building for the next generation: a world where children and teenagers live permanently online: school, friends, entertainment, identity…everything digital, all the time. If we don’t make software secure by design from the very beginning, the consequences for that generation will be huge.
And it became very personal when I started talking to my own daughters about my work. They are digital natives, always connected, and when I explain how a single vulnerable line of code can expose their photos, their messages or their future privacy, they listen with curiosity. They already understand that cybersecurity isn’t just “something for IT people”, but it directly affects their lives, and that’s when I realised that this was not just a job, it’s a mission. I want to be a role model for them and show that women can (and should) be part of building the digital world they will live in. So I actively encourage them to explore STEM and cybersecurity.
As a woman in tech, one of the biggest challenges I faced early on was simply being the only woman in the room in university classrooms, in engineering teams, in management meetings. For many years, that was the norm. The good news is that I’m now seeing change: more female engineers, more women leading technical work packages, and younger generations that no longer find it strange to see a woman involved in a cybersecurity project.
EU-funded projects like CONSOLE aim to drive innovation in cybersecurity. From your experience, what’s one key area where greater inclusion of women could make a tangible impact in strengthening Europe’s digital resilience?
Women tend to approach problems with a strong focus on the end-user experience and on long-term consequences. In cybersecurity, especially when we design tools for SMEs that often have minimal resources, that perspective is the most significant difference. Because a more diverse team naturally asks questions like: “Is this tool actually usable by a non-expert?”, “What happens if the SME only has one part-time IT person?” “How do we make compliance feel helpful instead of burdensome?”. Those are precisely the questions that turn a technically brilliant platform into one that actually gets adopted across Europe. Greater inclusion of women in cybersecurity product teams and research directly translates into more resilient, inclusive and adoptable solutions.
If you could choose one book to recommend to our readers, what would that book be and why?
I’ll go with the last book a friend gave me for Spain’s Book Day: La Ciudad by Lara Moreno. It’s not a tech book at all, it’s a beautiful, raw novel about women, cities, solitude and resilience. I loved it because, in a world where we spend our days talking about vulnerabilities, threats and attacks, it reminds me why we do all of this: to protect the human side of the digital society we’re building.
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