AWS Partner Network (APN) Blog

Caleidos’s Claudia Marquez: Celebrating International Women’s Day and Breaking the Bias

By Claudia Marquez, AWS Ambassador, CTO, and Co-Founder – Caleidos

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Technology has always been part of my life and my first memories involve a computer. My mom was a systems engineer and we always had technology around our house. She bought a programming book when I was 10 years old. I read it and started coding and fell in love with technology and the ability to create new things.

I wasn’t aware there existed a lot of bias in technology against women and that there wasn’t a lot of women working in technology since my mom was my main role model for the tech world.

Once I was in high school, I started to realize that my love for technology wasn’t expected in girls. I became aware that there weren’t a lot of women pursuing careers related to computer science. That didn’t stop me from following my passion for technology, and eventually I started working alongside my sister. Together, we founded Caleidos, a company where we make innovation happen using technology.

Founding a tech company as two women came with many challenges. We have entered meetings where everyone in the room were men and we knew that we were not what they were expecting in their heads as the founders of a tech company. A lot of times, our appearance generates prejudice or untrust in our capacity to execute a project. On many occasions, we had to speak to show and prove our technical abilities and knowledge on how to handle a complex tech project.

What has worked best for us to break the bias that exists in people’s heads is to show up and do excellent work. People started noticing that we delivered results, with a distinctive knowledge, passion, and committed way to do things. We were different from the rest, and we embrace this difference and made it shine.

We will continue to break the stereotypes, and by doing so we hope to pave the way for other women in the industry. We look forward to a society where diversity is acknowledged as a key for creating opportunities for everyone.

Today, Caleidos is a leading AWS Partner in the region with differentiated services and solutions in the cloud. We are strongly committed to transforming the tech industry, developing new services that we can scale-up through amazing, diverse and inclusive talent.
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Meet Claudia

Claudia Marquez is CTO and Co-Founder at Caleidos, an AWS Advanced Tier Services Partner that is focused on understanding user needs and delivering value fast, using lean methodologies. She is very passionate about technology and building solutions that have a positive impact on people and organizations.

Claudia has a strong software development and infrastructure background, specializing in DevOps. She has worked with banking, retail, automotive, insurance, and education industries, helping them innovate with Amazon Web Services (AWS) solutions.

Here are some blog posts written by Claudia:

International Women’s Day and #BreakTheBias

International Women’s Day (March 8) celebrates the social, economic, cultural, and political achievements of women. The day also marks a call to action for celebrating women’s achievements, raising awareness against gender bias, and accelerating gender equity.

The International Women’s Day theme for 2022 is #BreakTheBias. This theme acknowledges that gender biases, discrimination, and stereotypes exist, and provides an opportunity to be part of a movement that promotes a diverse, equitable, and inclusive culture both individually and collectively as an organization.

Amazon is committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion, and the company’s diverse perspectives come from many sources including gender, age, race, national origin, sexual orientation, culture, and education, as well as professional and life experiences. As we celebrate IWD in 2022, the AWS Partner Network (APN) is honored to share perspectives from female technical leaders from our global AWS Partner Ambassadors community.

This blog series highlights six trailblazing women who have shared their personal stories of how they overcame challenges, stereotypes, and barriers in their careers, who inspires them to #BreakTheBias every day, and valuable advice on developing a career in technology.

AWS Ambassador Partner Program

The AWS Ambassador Partner Program features a vibrant worldwide community of technical experts, known as AWS Ambassadors, from our services and software partners.

If you’re an employee of an AWS Partner, hold multiple AWS Certifications, and contribute to the AWS community through public presentations, open source projects, social media, and more, see if you qualify for the AWS Ambassador program. If you’re an AWS customer and want to contact an AWS Ambassador, we’ve listed each Ambassador on the AWS website so you can connect with them through their employer.

AWS Partner Solutions Architect Angelica Ortega contributed to this story.