Last month, Trajano stood in front of a 200-person audience that included chief executive officers and company chairmen at the inauguration of the retailer’s remodeled innovation laboratory, an operation with more than 450 engineers and specialists dedicated to creating products and services with new technologies. She talked about measures companies could adopt to tackle Brazil’s problem with violence against women.

Some of the disturbing facts: More than 500 women are victims of aggression every hour in Brazil, and a woman is raped every 11 minutes. One study by the Latin America Social Sciences Institute estimated that a third of Brazilian women murdered in 2013 were killed by a current or former romantic partner.

While women represent more than half the population, they’ll hold just 15 percent of seats in both houses of Congress following slight gains in Sunday’s election. The vote brought a resounding first-round victory for Jair Bolsonaro, who once said he wouldn’t pay the same wages to women and men, and told a congresswoman she didn’t “ deserve” to be raped.

“I’ll send my human resources director here immediately,” said Romeu Domingues, chairman at medical-diagnostics firm Diagnosticos da America SA, who attended the event. “Around 75 percent of our employees are women, as are 75 percent of our clients. We always knew violence was an issue, but hadn’t thought about how we could act.”

Another attendee, Fabio Coelho, Google’s managing director for Brazil, called Trajano “one of the great ambassadors for women’s rights in Brazil right now.”

Among Trajano’s other ventures is Women of Brazil, which supports income and gender equality as well as quotas to push more women into the workplace. Founded in 2013 with 40 executives, the organization now has more than 19,000 members.

As the group’s leader, Trajano talks to female judges, prosecutors, police chiefs and other women in positions of authority to encourage policies such as more police stations opened on the weekends and the hiring of psychologists who can help abused women. She also supports initiatives to bring assistance programs for women to more public health centers. In the corporate arena, the group is campaigning for a rule that would set a 30 percent quota for women on the boards of Brazilian companies.

Trajano, who says her family instilled her with “good self-esteem,” has always been an innovator. Magazine Luiza was a pioneer in 1991 when it created one of Brazil’s first online businesses, the so-called store from the year 2000.

“No one understood what that meant back then,” she said.

Facing Controversy
At the helm of the retailer from 1991 to 2015, Trajano also grappled with pressure from analysts who were urging the company to separate its bricks-and-mortar stores from the digital platform. The company’s valuation fell to as low as 174.2 million reais in December 2015 as the controversy raged.