For Rocío van Nierop, Latinas in Tech is more than just a nonprofit. In many ways, it is a rallying cry and a hope for more. Van Nierop, the Co-founder and CEO of the organization aptly called Latinas in Tech, has worked since 2014 to “provide the resources, opportunities, and community Latinas need to thrive, innovate, and lead in tech.” Remezcla had the opportunity to sit down with van Nierop to talk about Latinas in Tech, the lack of representation of Latinas in the tech space, and how Latinas are redefining inclusion in a sphere that hasn’t always welcomed them.
When Latinas in Tech started, van Nierop, who is Mexican, says “the Googles and the LinkedIns of the world were trying to launch their operations in Spanish. So to do that, they hired a person like me,” she shared, adding that since she and others like her were basically “an entrepreneur inside a startup,” they were basically on their own,” without any support internally. So where did they find that support? In each other.
And the idea is to keep finding ways to support other Latinas. “About 90% of our community has bachelor’s degrees or above, so we are more qualified, but yet we are absolutely underutilized.” Van Nierop shared. And there are hardly any role models that look like us, particularly in tech, “If you think of the Fortune 500 companies, Fortune 500 CEOs, there’s only one and she was named CEO of Fannie Mae not that long ago. Before, not a single Latina CEO, so 500, but they don’t take one percent of their dividends from the Latino market. They take much more.”
The numbers don’t add up to the representation. And that’s what van Nierop is trying to change with Latinas in Tech, an organization that comprises more that 26,000 women working at more than 100 of the top technology companies. “We are a large percentage of the population, almost 20%, 3.2 trillion dollars of GDP. If we were a country, we would be the fifth biggest economy in the world. So we have an enormous power that we’re not aware of and we’re here to open the eyes of people. And our goal is to make the effort, take the women we already have, and enable them to be those leaders that they should be because they have the qualifications.”
But the work of Latinas in Tech is also to help the women in our communities step into those spaces and understand they belong there, something that she’s been championing for more than 15 years. “If you look at our past, why wouldn’t we doubt ourselves, right? Nobody in our past has gone to college, my grandparents didn’t even go to high school, to middle school, and nobody had a 401k. So I have an accent, I didn’t go to an Ivy school. I’m the underdog.”
“We need to make them own the reality. If you are hired by these big companies, you are here for a reason. You have to step in and own it, it’s not take it until you make it, it’s believe it until you make it, so that is the job we’re trying to do with Latinas in Tech, to help women overcome those obstacles that can be inherent to their Latinidad, while at the same time, we try to fix the system or contribute to the system as much as we can.”
To learn more about Rocío van Nierop and how Latinas in Tech empowers women to become innovators and leaders, visit their official website here.
