Kara grew up as part of a big family in rural Co. Mayo. After her third-level studies at University College Dublin, she went travelling to Australia, got a job in an engineering office and didn't come home for ten years. While there, Kara worked as Project Manager on railroad contracts, which in turn led to her work in engineering.

When Claire was diagnosed with epilepsy, all the experts told her she would never get a college degree, never become an architect, never travel, or live away from home. Determined to succeed against the odds, in 2011 she graduated with an honours Architecture degree and since then she worked with the biggest architectural companies in Ireland.

Susan McKenna Lawlor is another role model: in 1985 she set up Space Technology Ireland (STIL), a high-tech company building instrumentation and subsystems for space missions. STIL designed the onboard electrical support system processor unit for the Rosetta spacecraft, which in 2004 performed the first successful landing on a comet.

Nicola graduated from the School of Veterinary Medicine in  UCD. Veterinary Science has experienced a dramatic turnaround in gender balance in recent years, more than any other profession in Ireland, with the percentage of female graduates rising from 34% in 1975 to 75% today.

Orla is a consultant neurologist in Beaumont Hospital, Dublin. She founded the Motor Neuron Disease Clinic and is Professor of Neurology at Trinity College, Dublin. She believes that any aspect of our society which is heavily biased towards one gender tends to make it difficult for the other.

Lena Singh is in a rather unusual position; highly trained in fibre optics cabling, she is contracts manager of a network communications company, responsible for 16 employees, all of them men.

Nora Khaldi founded Nuritas in 2014. It’s the first company in the world to introduce artificial intelligence (AI) and DNA analysis to the food arena to discover new disease-beating molecules in food. It’s now one of Ireland’s fastest-growing start-ups, and Khaldi won the prestigious Woman of the Decade in Business and Leadership Award at the 2017 Women Economic Forum.