An organisation for gender equality at the workplace
Women On Top is an organization aimed at enhancing female employment and promoting equality in the workplace. It was established in 2012 and since then has created and attended over 260 mentoring partnerships for the benefit of unemployed women, women who want to change career direction or who want to develop into male-dominated fields, and has trained over 500 unemployed, employed and self-employed women in professional development workshops, complete with a childcare service for their little ones.
At the same time, through the initiative of Women On Top in Business, it provides training, consulting and project management services to businesses and organizations wishing to promote the equal representation of women in the labor market.
Women on Top is supported by HIGGS, an incubator for the development of Non Profit Organizations in Greece.
Our story
We founded Women On Top based on our own need, in different phases of our professional life, to find and work with women who have already faced the challenges we were facing and to draw from their knowledge, experience and inspiration to make our professional dreams come true.
Then we began to study in depth the factors that inhibit the professional development of women and their equal participation in the Greek labor market and decision-making centers.
Women on Top has now transformed into an organization with the vision to empower women at all stages of their lives, eliminating gender discrimination at work and promoting the equal participation of men and women in the economy for the sake of us all.
Our vision
To eliminate the obstacles that inhibit the equal participation of women in the labor market, i.e.:
Increased unemployment
Low representation in positions of responsibility
Low representation in male-dominated and STEM fields
The gender wage gap
Sexual harassment
The lack of work/life balance
… on the one hand, by empowering them and, on the other, by bringing a change in the social, labor and political environment around them.
Our initiatives
We implement initiatives (mentoring, training, consulting and project management, educational interventions, research, policy proposals) aimed to empower women in different phases of their professional life, but also to improve the social, labor and political environment within which they develop.
Our impact
Volunteer mentors
Completed mentoring relationships
Participants in professional development workshops
- Participants who have evaluated WoT’s initiatives as absolutely or very effective in relation to their goals and prior expectations. 82%
Women on Top is supported by HIGGS, an incubator for the development of Non Profit Organizations in Greece.
Founding team
Stella Kasdagli
Co-founder
Stella Kasdagli is a journalist, writer and translator and she came up with the idea for WoT in 2010. She studied French literature in Athens and Media Theory in London and worked for several years as editor of Cosmopolitan magazine, collaborating with other Greek and English printed publications and sites. She is now working as a translator and, through Women On Top, she plans and implements actions to empower women and promote gender equality at the workplace. She is also the co-founder of the Mentorkids mentoring network for teens and of the online reading club Bookworm. Her books, Koillitsa.com, I Just Wanted To Fit In, as well as the series of Princess Athena, are published by Patakis publications. She has two daughters and keeps growing up alongside them in Athens, Greece.
Pinelopi Theodorakakou
Personal & Executive Coach
Pinelopi studied Media Studies at the University of Sussex and continued with her postgraduate studies at the Communications & Public Relations Department of the University of Westminster in London. The Communication and Public Relations won her over for the first 15 years of her career. Now, as Certified Personal and Executive Coach, she supports individuals -with a greater emphasis on women and teens- to design their personal and professional lives by setting and achieving goals that are meaningful and worthwhile for them. At the same time, as a co-founder of Women on Top, he has an active role in planning, organizing and coordinating the organization’s initiatives, as well as the Mentorkids mentoring network for the vocational guidance of teens.
Galini Iliopoulou
Organisational psychologist
Galini Iliopoulou is a Psychologist (MSc in Occupational & Organizational Psychology, University of Surrey, University of Athens) and works as Senior Consultant for Human Resources at ICAP. In the past, she worked in similar positions in consulting firms HayGroup and SHLHellas. She recently completed her business coaching (Triple Certification in Coaching – ICPS). She has extensive experience in evaluating and developing employees and executives.Our partnerships
