“I am extremely honoured to receive the Grace Hopper award and I would like to thank Women in Tech for choosing me. It is very humbling to be chosen amongst such a sea of incredible talent here in Ireland. It feels like only yesterday that I was a new grad, not really knowing much but filled with enthusiasm about working in the tech industry. Fast forward to today and I have had the privilege to work with so many incredible people that have helped, coached, inspired, and propelled me along the way. Thank you to each and every one of you. Picking up the baton from last year’s winner Brenda Romero is certainly intimidating but I will do my best.”

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Barbara is the CTO of Ding, the number one international mobile top-up platform in the world. She is currently the only female CTO of a high-growth, scale-up, technology company in Ireland. She has 20+ years’ experience of building best in class software development teams within rapid growth organisations. Prior to joining Ding, Barbara worked at HubSpot where she was Director of Engineering, where she led the expansion of their Engineering team in Dublin. Her experience spans a number of sectors – and she has held senior Technology roles at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and Inspired Gaming Group, among others. She has pioneered lots of different initiatives and programmes to increase diversity across the technology sector, is an advocate for women and underrepresented groups within the tech community and is a prominent thought leader and speaker at industry events.

Barbara is also a huge advocate for creating great cultures within workplaces and is a passionate believer that positive work cultures are the key to successful companies. She is a regular speaker at Industry events and has received a number of accolades including: Business Role Model of the Year (Women in IT awards), named by Silicon Republic as one of ’25 of Ireland’s phenomenal women in engineering; and for International Women’s day made the list of ‘Inspiring Women in STEM in Ireland”.

Barbara is a mentor at the 30% Club Ireland (an organisation aimed at achieving better gender balance at all levels of Irish businesses) and is a non-executive board member of the Social Innovation Fund Ireland (an organisation aimed at finding and backing innovative solutions to critical social issues in Ireland).

She is married to Donal, has 2 children (Maya and Donal) and has recently succumbed to getting a dog (Fluff) after getting asked for one every day for 2 years (and is now crazy about the dog)! One of her passions is Irish traditional music and she plays accordion and tinwhistle regularly.

We look forward to hearing Barbara McCarthy speak on stage at the Women in Tech Awards 2019 in association with Permanent TSB.