Q&A: Panama Canal’s First Woman Administrator Looks Ahead

Ilya Espino de Marotta reflects on her 40-year rise from shipyard engineer to the first woman set to lead the Panama Canal Authority.

When Ilya Espino de Marotta began working for the Panama Canal in the late 1980s, she was one of just two women employed as engineers for the waterway. In October, she will become the first woman to lead the Panama Canal Authority (Autoridad del Canal de Panamá, or ACP), the quasi-governmental agency that oversees the canal’s operations.

When the ACP board of directors announced May 21 that it had chosen Espino de Marotta to serve as the canal’s administrator for the 2026-33 term, it ended a search that screened more than 100 candidates from inside and outside the institution. It was the role she has spent the past 40 years preparing for.

Espino de Marotta has served as the ACP’s executive vice president for engineering, chief operating officer, deputy administrator and chief sustainability officer. Most notably, she was the project director for the $5.4-billion Third Set of Locks expansion, completed in 2016.

Former ACP Administrator Jorge Luis Quijano tells ENR he recommended Espino de Marotta twice at career-pivot moments: first in 2012 to take over the expansion program he was leaving to become the canal administrator, and again in 2019 to step into the chief operating officer role.

“She’s very flexible. She has had the opportunity to be in many places, many jobs in the canal. That gave her the overall knowledge of the canal, which not many people had the opportunity to go through,” he says. “She also has a good relationship with all the employees. That’s the human side, which is always very important for any administrator to have.”

Espino de Marotta spoke with ENR recently about her experience working on the canal, her expectations for the job ahead and her prioritization of gender equity in both the ACP and technical industries overall.

ENR: You came into the canal in 1985 as a marine engineer in the Industrial Division shipyard. What was that environment like?
Espino de Marotta: I was the only woman marine engineer, and there was also a maintenance engineer. So there were two of us. Two women engineers in the whole shipyard. The canal was a different institution then. The handover was still 14 years away. The shipyard was a place where you proved that you could do the work and earn the next assignment on the merits of that work. I did that for a long time.

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From a start in the canal shipyard, you eventually became executive vice president for engineering over the Third Lane expansion in 2012. What did your team consist of?

Espino de Marotta: It wasn’t a technical role. It was a management role. I was the project director, so I was not involved in the nitty-gritty engineering. It was more the strategy on managing contracts, 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. By that point, you’d been wearing a pink hard hat on the project site for nearly a decade. What was the reason for that?

Espino de Marotta: When I bought the pink hard hat 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 to young professionals, female young professionals, that are in a traditional male environment.

The signal lands inside the canal organization. Did it also land for you as outreach beyond?

Espino de Marotta: A traditional male environment is not unique to the Panama Canal. Construction, marine engineering, heavy infrastructure. The pattern is the same in a lot of places. If a young woman who is considering this kind of career sees someone leading a project at this scale and recognizes the message, that is the signal. The hard hat is one piece of it. The work itself is the rest.

Your success is the culmination 40-year arc for one engineer, but the pipeline behind that arc for other women isn’t yet self-sustaining at the senior level.

Espino de Marotta: That is the honest version. We have more than 1,000 women working across the canal now. The headcount story is one part of it. The leadership-continuity story, keeping women at the executive level after individuals move on, is a different question. It is a question I’ll carry into the administrator role.

You moved from the expansion to chief operating officer in 2019, then deputy administrator at the end of that year, then chief sustainability officer in 2024 and now administrator. What did the COO years specifically teach you?

Espino de Marotta: Seven thousand people, six different unions, the operational part of it, a lot of interaction with our clients. It is different from running a project. Running a project, you have a defined scope, a defined budget, a defined finish line. Running the operation, you are doing it every day and every day is different. That experience shaped how I think about the institution as a whole.

The June 2022 piece the ACP published on gender equality at the canal framed your career as both an individual story and an institutional commitment. How do you see the canal’s role in the broader industry conversation?

Espino de Marotta: The canal is a unique institution, but the people who work here come from the same engineering schools, the same construction industry, the same contractor and consultant community as everyone else in the region. What we do here on workforce development gets noticed because the canal is visible. That visibility comes with a responsibility—to develop people, to keep them, and to be honest when the institutional results haven’t matched the institutional message.

Former administrator Jorge Luis Quijano has said the canal “never stops upgrading itself.” Where do you want the canal to be at the end of your seven-year term in 2033?

Espino de Marotta: Every time I go to a new job, I love everything I do. Every time I go, I go into something new and something different. The administrator role is a more strategic, board-facing role than the ones before it. But the pattern is the same: take something complex and make sure the institution is stronger when you hand it off than when you took it on. If, at the end of seven years, the canal is running well, the capital plan is delivering, the water situation is structurally addressed and there is a deeper bench of women in executive roles than there is today, that would be a successful term.

Related links:

June 23, 2026: Two Pressures, One Canal: Conservation Meets Geopolitics at Panama
July 9, 2024: Panama Canal Officials Detail $1.6B Reservoir Project Needed to Bolster Water Supply
July 31, 2023: Severe Drought Prompts Panama Canal Passage Limits
June 15, 2016: Panama Canal Expansion Wraps Up