As part of the eleventh edition of the DonaTIC Awards , organized by the Secretariat of Digital Policies of the Department of Business and Employment of the Generalitat de Catalunya, Laura García Maraña has been awarded the DonaTIC 2025 Award in the 'Entrepreneur' category. The DonaTIC 2025 Awards are part of the DonaTIC Plan of the Generalitat de Catalunya and are benchmark awards to highlight and recognize the role and talent of women and increase the representativeness of the group within digital technologies, as well as offering new contemporary female role models and promoting vocations in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. From the Xarxa Punt TIC, we talk to Laura García Maraña about the recognition.
1. What did receiving the DonaTIC 2025 Award mean to you?
When I go to events, trainings, congresses or events, around me, I find very, very powerful women. For this reason, I would never have personally applied for the DonaTIC Awards, but they encouraged me to do so. After thinking about it, I said yes, thinking above all about the possibility of encouraging girls, young women and women. At the same time, receiving the DonaTIC 2025 Award was an impetus for my business project: SialSIG , a geographic information systems cooperative designed for social projects and linked to environmental projects.
2. What has been your professional career?
I studied to be an agricultural engineer because I saw a great need to help farmers so that their work was valued and their work was recognized. When I finished my degree, I took a course where I discovered geographic information systems and suddenly everything made sense. Data gives us a lot of perspective, a lot of power and above all a lot of capacity for analysis, research and study. Honestly, I have always been a lover of technology and data.
3. What are your future challenges?
I want to share projects, collaborate with parts of projects or be part of collaborative projects, because I want to create initiatives or develop activities hand in hand with other professionals in the sector. I also have the challenge of reconciling and at the same time making an economic project sustainable with a deep social perspective. Since I was very young, I have carried the desire that work has a social value, that it can be applied to make people's lives better.
4. Why is it important to promote STEM vocations among girls and women?
I think it's vital. We need to encourage them to enter the technological world, leaving behind the pressures and fears: they don't have to do everything right, they don't have to do everything perfectly and they can contribute a lot. Women have a very different vision, very creative and very innovative. We also have a deeply rooted social perspective, and we detect needs and think of solutions. Technology is not just about programming, technology is everywhere.