Stefania Panico, CFO of Defence Tech, was recently included by Federmanager in the list of the best women managers under 44. An achievement that she lives with joy, yes, but also with a strong sense of responsibility, as she recounts in her interview for BCC.
“On 28 June 2011, the Gulf-Moscow Law was passed imposing listed companies to reserve quotas for the less represented gender increasing in boards of directors. In this decade, the law, although it may seem a stretch, has made a major change possible: female board members have risen from around 7% in 2011 to 37% in 2020. However, I believe that although we can see significant improvements in terms of a stronger presence of the female gender in top management positions, the issue of gender equality is still struggling to make its way onto the agenda of boardrooms and organisations at large. (...) As a female manager and board member of a listed company, I know how difficult it is to climb the corporate ladder and make important decisions but, at the same time, I believe that we have a moral obligation to contribute to the dissemination of a corporate culture aimed at reducing the gender gap. I am certain that it will in fact be the pressure from institutional investors on ESG issues that will provide the decisive push for companies to address gender equality as
strategic theme.'.
During the interview, Panico focuses not only on the role of women within companies, but also on that of younger people. It is precisely in the university environment, in fact, that Defence Tech identifies most of its future employees, drawing from the pool of Italian universities.
"60% of our employees are engineers specialised in telecommunications, IT, electronics, aerospace. The first part of our selection process starts with collaborations with the academic world, thanks to agreements that allow us to identify profiles in undergraduates. For us, it is essential that an undergraduate acquires, even before coming to us, the fundamental characteristics for working in a company that has become strategic for national security. It is thanks to young talent that we upgrade our know-how. But today it is also a target for young talent, because objectively it is difficult in Italy to find a company with levels of specificity like ours."
“We would like to establish a growth programme with them right away and therefore view a public-private partnership with great interest. The
collaboration between a public agency and a company from the governmental world is in the natural course of growth of both our group
than the Agency itself. Moreover, the Agency represents a formidable opportunity to grow because it will tend to favour domestic over foreign technologies of equal technical merit."
