Barclays : colleagues on celebrating International Women’s Day

For Alexa Mbugua, who worked as a Chemical Engineer before joining Barclays' HR Operations in the UK, the events of 2020 which 'brought inequalities to light' gives IWD 2021's theme - 'choose to challenge' - even greater importance.

'This is the right time to have a conversation and to challenge a lot of things,' she says. 'When I started my career as an engineer, I frequently walked into rooms where I was the youngest, I was the only female and I was the only black person - and that was not an easy thing to navigate.

This is the right time to have a conversation and to challenge a lot of things.

Alexa Mbugua

Barclays HR Operations, UK

Alexa Mbugua works in Barclays HR Operations in the UK.

'The more I see people who look like me in the workplace, and women at a senior level, the more I think, 'I could get there'. Women are 50% of the world, so we want the workplace to reflect the reality of the world.'

Mbugua says it's important to challenge preconceptions of who a job role is for. 'It's that idea of what does an engineer look like? What does a consultant look like? We shouldn't be labelled, especially with terms like 'career woman' - there's no such thing as a 'career man', so what does that actually mean?'