Luiza Helena Trajano, the chairwoman of Brazilian retailer Magazine Luiza SA, had just finished a speech last year when she got the call from her firm’s security detail: A 37-year-old store manager in Campinas, Denise Neves dos Anjos, had been stabbed to death in her bedroom. Neves’s husband, the main suspect, was found dead in his car.

The violent murder -- Neves’s body was bound and her neck had been slashed -- shocked Trajano, an only child who grew up in Brazil’s wealthiest state. She had never encountered acts of brutality up close.

“I felt terrible,” Trajano said in an interview at Magazine Luiza’s headquarters in Sao Paulo. “I knew for a long time that one woman is killed in Brazil every two hours, but I confess I thought it was an issue far removed from us.”

Shock turned to determination. After the murder, Trajano created a telephone line where employees could report violence or suspicious activity. The company has already fielded 180 calls, including from men, Trajano said. Victims receive legal and psychological aid, and advice on how to report crimes to the authorities.

Magazine Luiza also set quotas: Abused women now must represent at least 2 percent of outsourced employees at the retailer, on the theory that having a job brings independence and can be a first step toward having the wherewithal to leave an abusive husband, Trajano said. The firm also created sales campaigns to raise funds for non-governmental organizations that support women.

Billionaire Ranks
Trajano transformed Magazine Luiza from a small firm created in 1957 by her aunt and uncle, Luiza Trajano Donato and Pelegrino Jose Donato, into a company with a market value of 28.8 billion reais ($7.8 billion). The retailer’s shares have jumped 88 percent this year, compared with 13 percent for the benchmark Ibovespa. The surge pushed Trajano into the rarefied ranks of Brazilian billionaires. Her stake of nearly 19 percent, mostly through holding companies with controlling interests, is worth 5.47 billion reais.

Trajano attributes some of that success to the fact that she’s a woman, bringing a perspective that’s been lacking at the top of some Brazilian companies.

“There are meetings where I am the only woman, and I rely a lot on my intuition, on my wit -- I always had a feminine way of managing,” she said. “I have nothing against men. I believe in joining male and female forces.”

One example: She’s been known to cry at work meetings. While that kind of emotion is frowned upon in a male-dominated management environment, Trajano said it humanizes the corporate culture.

“When I had to cry, I cried,” she said.

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.

“We didn’t believe in this separation because we just thought it would increase costs,” Trajano said.

The firm invested in an integrated distribution and transportation center, in digitization and innovation laboratories. “Today, we are a technological firm, visited by people from all over the world,” she said. The market eventually came around to the integrated model, and now competitors are trying to catch up while Magazine Luiza thrives, with more than 900 stores, 25,000 employees and a third of its sales coming from e-commerce.

Trajano declined to talk about her preferred candidate in the presidential election this month. But there was one point she wanted to make: “We don’t like any speech, from a politician or not, that degrades race or gender diversity, that degrades women.”

This article was provided by Bloomberg News.