Monica Ioannidou Polemitis is a Partner at TKI and Managing Director for the EMEA region. She sits on the Board of the Research and Innovation Foundation of Cyprus, is a founding member and President of ICC Cyprus Women, and is the author of The Data Edge: How to Compete, Lead and Innovate with Information.
Early professional start
Polemitis’s path into the professional world was not linear, and deliberately so. She worked through both school and university, taking jobs in tourism, summer programmes, waiting tables, and at university advice centres. She wanted to become a journalist and launched her career teaching and writing for a newspaper. But then consulting came along, and she pursued that opportunity, which led her to join a Big Four firm. There she worked in financial advisory for nearly fifteen years, and eventually built her own company, centred on data infrastructure.
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What ties all of her paths together, she says, is curiosity. A refusal to stay within the lane she was given.
That refusal was tested most visibly in the technology world, a sector she entered without a technical background, and has operated in ever since. “I was sometimes feeling a little bit less relevant in the room because I was not technical,” she muses. But she thrived in that space. With the rise of artificial intelligence, she finds that her background in business, politics, data analysis, and her journalist’s instinct for story framing is increasingly the thing people are missing in technology rooms. “My background is probably super valuable,” she says, “because it allows me to see stuff from a very different point of view than just a coder.”
Two years ago, she learned to code anyway. Not to just add to her CV, but to actually understand the mechanics of coding. To see both sides of the coin. Because that is how she operates.
Borderless
Growing up in Cyprus is its own story. Young Monica always felt the island’s smallness acutely in her body— its borders, whether literal or psychological. “I was feeling that I wanted to do more stuff,” she says. She studied in Britain and came back, but not to settle. At least, not in any way that would confine her. She purposely built professional ties outside Cyprus, not only so she could travel but also to bring knowledge back in. “I tried to get knowledge from outside into Cyprus,” she says. “It’s always nice to have this combination of diverse experiences.”
It is the kind of freedom that has allowed her to open her wings, but also to build a nest. In her own way, she has made the Cyprus borderless for herself.
Corporate ladder
The conversation turns to what she has witnessed climbing the corporate ladder, and what she didn’t see until she was already near the top. She didn’t notice the gender gap when she was starting out. Everyone was polite, working towards shared goals. It was only as she began competing for senior positions that she realised how few people like her were working in her side of the office.
“I say to young women now: wait till you get there. You will understand,” she says. Though she may have been the only woman among boards of men, she showed up, proved herself, and was trusted. But she is very aware of the fact that the same path wasn’t available to everyone. “Women are less aware of what we bring to the table,” she says. “We communicate it less, or in a manner that is not so visible.”
That blind spot is part of what ICC Cyprus Women exists to address. The organisation, which she helped found, works to increase the representation of women in executive and decision-making roles through awareness, knowledge-sharing, and pressure on the institutions that set the terms. The debate around quotas, she says, is real and remains prevalent not only in Cyprus but also across the borders. What she is certain about is the gap. “Bottom up, it’s great. Top down, there’s still a lot of obstacles.”
A message for the next generation
Asked what she would tell young women choosing their futures at present, she says: choose what you love first, and don’t choose your degree based on who will be sitting next to you. Technology is not only for coders. Data is not only for developers. The world is changing fast enough that the people who can see across disciplines, who can translate, frame, and connect, will be tomorrow’s difference.
The full episode goes deeper on all of these topics — the book, the data revolution, the politics of gender quotas, and what Monica believes it will actually take to make the biggest change in Cyprus.
Monica Ioannidou Polemitis is the second guest on The Future Makers: Women Building Cyprus. The full episode is available to watch now.
The Future Makers Podcast is a series of in-depth conversations about how future-makers are made, in Cyprus and beyond. Host Annetta Benzar sits down with people who are a leading force in our shared future and looks past the titles. Together, they travel back to the people and moments that shaped them, walk through the choices and challenges they are living through now, and look ahead to the futures they are trying to build.
The first season, Women Building Cyprus, follows women whose lives and decisions are changing what this island can be.
A production of OLOI Media and The Future Media.
