Pollera Pantalón reconoce líderes femeninas en tecnología, justicia y educación

The Augusta Golf Club in Buenos Aires filled with something different on the evening of the fifth Mujeres por Más awards ceremony. Instead of the formal protocols that had marked previous years, two musicians—Agustina Ayllón and Valeria Shapira—opened the night with tango, setting a tone that organizers of the Pollera Pantalón initiative had deliberately chosen: this was a gathering, not a gala. The event, held by an organization founded in 2018 to create spaces where women from different professional sectors could meet and collaborate, had grown into something the community now watched closely as a marker of how female leadership was advancing across Argentina.

Six categories of recognition shaped the evening, each one reflecting a different corner of professional life where women were pushing against old boundaries. Yesica Méndez received the award for Technology and Innovation, recognized for her work in the FemTech ecosystem, building tools that combined artificial intelligence and personalized health solutions for millions of women across Latin America. In Education and Inclusion, Graciela Bertolino was honored—though she was not present to receive it herself—for becoming the first woman in seventy years to direct the Instituto Balseiro, an institution where her doctorate in physics and research into advanced materials had strengthened international partnerships while opening doors for more women in the sciences. Graciela Adán, connected to the Fundación Global and to Pollera Pantalón itself from its earliest days, received recognition in the Civic Formation category for her work strengthening democratic participation and values.

Liliana Parodi's award for Reinvention carried its own weight. She had spent her career in broadcast media and corporate life, and when that chapter closed, she faced the question many do at that threshold: what now? She had chosen to build a new platform focused on what she called the silver generation—people navigating active aging in a society that rarely made space for them. Standing at the podium, Parodi spoke directly about the disorientation of that pivot. "I didn't even know I was reinventing myself," she said, "but something had to be done." She described learning new vocabulary, meeting new people, discovering that reinvention could happen at any moment—after high school, after loss, after retirement. "When I realized I had more than sixty years and was retiring, I thought: how am I going to retire if I have forty more years left? So I have to live."

The evening's most symbolically dense moment came with the Trajectory Award, given jointly to two judges: María Eugenia Capuchetti and Marcela De Langhe. Both had built careers in Argentina's judiciary, a profession historically dominated by men, and both had done so with what the award citation called professionalism, independence, and public commitment. When De Langhe spoke, she did not celebrate the recognition alone. Instead, she named what remained invisible: women in the justice system, largely unrecognized and rarely rewarded by the institutions they served. She spoke of glass ceilings that made no sound when struck, of sticky floors that held women in place for years without being visible to anyone outside the profession. "The hardest part is not identifying them," she said, "but explaining that this is still happening."

A new category debuted this year: Commitment, recognizing those who had supported Pollera Pantalón's growth from the beginning. Adrián Werthein of Grupo Werthein and Guillermo Cerviño, president of Banco COMAFI, received this award for their active collaboration in building the community. Marina Rosso Siverino, president of the initiative, framed the evening in her opening remarks as a collective effort to make visible and encourage social transformation through the work of women leaders in their fields. Each award, she suggested, was not just about individual achievement but about the networks that sustained each journey, the relationships that made transformation possible.

The ceremony itself had been redesigned to reflect this philosophy. The two hosts, Maricel Lungarzo and Yanina Kogan, guided the evening through spontaneous conversation rather than formal protocol, reinforcing the sense of community that had animated the initiative since its founding. The event signaled something about where Argentine female leadership stood: consolidating in spaces that had long resisted it, building networks that multiplied impact, and naming—finally, publicly—the structural barriers that remained even as women moved into positions of authority and influence.