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 bit,” she says. “I really felt I had to move back, at least to try it out and contribute somehow.” What Latin America’s tech space lacked When Costa, her husband, and a friend from graduate school moved to Lima, they had modest savings and big ambitions. They wanted to build something that combined technology with social impact. They started with what they had: a small digital services agency, where they built websites for clients. The business grew, and they hired more employees. Their team expanded to a dozen software engineers. And as it did, Costa noticed three things. First, there weren’t enough trained developers to meet the demand. Second, many of their best hires did not have traditional computer science degrees. Some had never even finished college. “There was no other space where you could actually build an amazing career and get a well-paying job without a good degree from a good school,” she says. “The tech world was different. It was open in ways other fields weren’t.” Thirdly, she noticed that there were no women on the team. In the first six months, Costa says, they didn’t interview a single female developer. Her colleagues shrugged. It’s just how it is, they told her. Costa, the outsider, didn’t accept that. “I said, ‘How can that be? The tech space has so many rich opportunities,’” she says. “‘Why aren’t there any women?’” Building Laboratoria In 2014 she decided to launch Laboratoria. The business model was simple: Find talented women who hadn’t yet broken into tech, train them quickly on practical skills, and connect them with employers who needed developers. Laboratoria started offering a six-month immersive boot camp that covered Web development, UX design, data literacy , strategic use of artificial intelligence , and soft-skills coaching such as interview prep and projecting confidence. Just as important for career success, Costa says, is a user-centered mindset . She says Laboratoria’s program emphasizes the discipline of keeping the client’s needs in mind when designing the work. The teaching model has evolved beyond the boot-camp structure, but the organization still focuses on helping Latin American women develop tech skills and land quality jobs in the digital age. These days, the training, conducted via twice-weekly live Zoom sessions, lasts six weeks. “We needed developers ourselves,” she says of the company’s original logic. “I said, ‘Why don’t we run a program to train women—women who are incredibly talented but haven’t been given a chance yet—and help them gain the skills they need to get a great job as quickly as possible?’” Mariana Costa [seated, right] poses with Laboratoria co-founder and CEO Gabriela Rocha and co-founder and chief product officer Rodulfo Prieto. Valeria Martens It worked. Laboratoria expanded from Lima to Santiago, Chile; Mexico City; São Paulo, Brazil; and Bogotá, Colombia. The organization eventually incorporated as a nonprofit in the United States. Today its programs are held remotely in Latin America’s major job markets. So far, Laboratoria has opened the doors to tech careers for more than 3,500 women. Costa says she believes the most important skills Laboratoria’s graduates need aren’t purely technical. Close behind the growth mindset is self-confidence, she says. “Knowing who you are, valuing who you are, and learning to trust yourself and your capacities are indispensable traits,” she says. Networking, she adds, is the third pillar, and often the hardest to build for women without access to elite schools or flexible work schedules. “When you go out in the market,” she says, “you realize that having a network of people who trust you and know your work is such a valuable and critical asset.” IEEE: a new connection Costa’s introduction to IEEE came late—but it landed hard. She is not an IEEE member, so when she was contacted this year about receiving the President’s Award, she did her homework on the organization. What she found, she says, was a public charity whose reach and values aligned with her mission. “IEEE is about expanding access to opportunities in the world of technology,” she says. “And that’s also the core of what we do at Laboratoria.” She says she also sees IEEE as a living example of something her company preaches every day: “I was talking about the value of professional networks, and I think IEEE is such an amazing reference in that space. It exemplifies this belief that human connection—not only doing your work but also sharing and learning with others—is at the core of building thriving technology careers.” The engineering organization found her well after she launched her tech-related career. But it wasn’t too late. She says she intends to make the most of the connection.