When Ilya Espino de Marotta started working for the Panama Canal in the late 1980s, she was one of two women employed as engineers for the waterway. In October, she will become the first woman to head the Panama Canal Authority (ACP), the quasi-governmental agency that oversees the canal’s operations.
When the ACP’s board of directors announced on May 21 that it had chosen Espino de Marotta to serve as the channel’s administrator for the 2026-33 term, it ended a search that selected more than 100 candidates from inside and outside the institution. It was the role he has been preparing for for the past 40 years.
Espino de Marotta has served as ACP’s executive vice president of engineering, chief operating officer, deputy administrator and chief sustainability officer. Most notably, she was the project manager for the $5.4 billion third set of locks expansion, completed in 2016.
Former ACP administrator Jorge Luis Quijano tells ENR that he recommended Espino de Marotta twice at times in the race: first in 2012 to take over the expansion program he was leaving to become the channel’s administrator, and again in 2019 to fill the position of director of operations.
“He’s very flexible. He’s had the opportunity to be in a lot of places, a lot of jobs in the channel. That gave him the general knowledge of the channel, which not a lot of people got a chance to go through,” he says. “He also has a good relationship with all the employees. That’s the human part, which is always very important for any administrator.”
Espino de Marotta recently spoke with ENR about her experience working on the channel, her expectations for future work, and her prioritization of gender equity in both ACP and technical industries in general.
ENR: You entered the channel in 1985 as a marine engineer in the Industrial Division shipyard. What was that environment like?
Espí de Marotta: I was the only female marine engineer, and there was also a female maintenance engineer. So there were two of us. Two female engineers in the entire shipyard. The channel was a different institution then. There were still 14 years to go before the transfer. The shipyard was a place where you proved you could do the job and earn the next assignment on the merit of that job. I did it for a long time.
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From a start in the canal shipyard, you eventually became the executive vice president of engineering for the Third Lane expansion in 2012. What did your team consist of?
Espí de Marotta: It was not a technical paper. It was a management function. I was the project manager, so I wasn’t involved in the basic engineering. It was more the contract management strategy, contractors. I had 800 people working under me.
An ACP retrospective on the expansion published in 2022 noted that 14% of those 800 engineers were women. At that point, you had been wearing a pink helmet on the project site for almost a decade. What was the reason for this?
Espí de Marotta: When I bought the pink helmet in 2012 or ’13, that was the message. The message is that a woman can lead a complex engineering project. I think it sends a very powerful message to young girls and young professionals, young professional women, who are in a traditionally male environment.
The signal lands within the channel organization. Did it also land you as further outreach?
Espí de Marotta: A traditional male environment is not unique to the Panama Canal. Construction, marine engineering, heavy infrastructure. The pattern is the same in many places. If a young woman considering this kind of career sees someone leading a project on this scale and recognizes the message, that’s the sign. The helmet is one piece. The work itself is the rest.
Your success is the culmination of a 40-year arc for an engineer, but the pipeline behind that arc for other women is still not self-sustaining at a higher level.
Espí de Marotta: This is the honest version. We now have over 1,000 women working across the channel. The history of counting is a part of it. The story of leadership continuity, keeping women at the executive level after individuals move on, is a different matter. It’s a question I’ll take to the admin role.
You moved from expansion to director of operations in 2019, then to deputy administrator at the end of that year, then to director of sustainability in 2024 and now to administrator. What specifically have your COO years taught you?
Espí de Marotta: Seven thousand people, six different unions, the operational part, a lot of interaction with our customers. It’s different from running a project. Running a project, you have a defined scope, a defined budget, a defined goal. Running the trade, you’re doing it every day and every day is different. This experience shaped how I think about the institution as a whole.
The June 2022 piece the ACP published on gender equality in the channel framed your career as both an individual story and an institutional commitment. How do you see the channel’s role in the larger industry conversation?
Espí de Marotta: The channel is a unique institution, but the people who work there come from the same engineering schools, the same construction industry, the same community of contractors and consultants as everyone else in the region. What we do here on workforce development gets noticed because the channel is visible. This visibility comes with a responsibility: to develop people, to keep them and to be honest when the institutional results do not match the institutional message.
Former administrator Jorge Luis Quijano has said that the channel “never stops improving”. Where do you want the channel to be at the end of your seven-year term in 2033?
Espí de Marotta: Every time I go to a new job, I love everything I do. Every time I go there, I walk into something new and different. The administrator role is a more strategic and board-oriented role than the previous ones. But the pattern is the same: take something complex and make sure the institution is stronger when you hand it over than when you took it on. If, after seven years, the canal is working well, the capital plan is being met, the water situation is being addressed structurally, and there is a deeper bench of women in executive roles than there is today, that would be a successful mandate.
