The President of UCP, Isabel Capeloa Gil, was one of the personalities invited to the 2nd edition of the Forbes Women's Summit, and was one of the most applauded during the afternoon session at the Time Out Studio in Lisbon.
In the panel ‘The Power of Leadership - Ask the President’, shared with Foundever's General Manager Multilingual Region, Benedita Miranda, Isabel Capeloa Gil said that one of the differentiating factors of female leadership is ‘not wanting to imitate other models’.
‘Female leadership makes a difference if we dare to believe in our difference,’ said the UCP President, who is also the first woman to lead the International Federation of Catholic Universities (FIUC).
Emphasising that ‘a thousand years after the creation of the first Universities, especially in terms of top leadership, the Academy is still mostly male’, Isabel Capeloa Gil revealed that the FIUC is working on a policy document with the aim of asking all the Presidents, Rectors and Vice-Rectors of Catholic Universities to commit to ‘promoting women, in order to achieve parity in the Institutions’.
Currently, only 8 per cent of the Presidents, Rectors or Vice-Chancellors of Catholic Universities in the world are women, and the President of the FIUC since 2018 has been Isabel Capeloa Gil.
In the year in which she is the only Portuguese woman to appear on the Forbes 50 over 50 list, Isabel Capeloa Gil also left a challenge - which earned her an ovation from the room - when she was asked about the difficulty of reconciling personal and professional life: ‘We will only have a truly egalitarian society when this question is also asked of men. We're constantly talking about this issue of reconciliation, men are also fathers, they both have children, we need to ask the question of fathers too.’
The 2nd Forbes Women's Summit: ‘The Power of Difference’ took place at Time Out Market in Lisbon and brought together leaders and agents of change to discuss the challenges and opportunities for the effective implementation of gender equality (of conditions and opportunities) in Portugal, emphasising the power of women on this path.
