Femmes3000 Côte d'Azur

Digital inclusion has been a strong theme in Ms Mesnage’s work at Accenture. An early project, for example, experimented with the idea of using a network of cameras and sensors to monitor elderly people living alone, detecting events such as a fall and, if necessary, alerting the emergency services.

At a time when demographic trends point to an increasingly ageing population in the advanced world, this sort of technology would enable many more people to retain their independence as they aged.

Currently, Ms Mesnage is focusing her expertise on another pressing subject: climate change. Along with two colleagues, she is investigating how intelligent sensors might be embedded into devices and vehicles to monitor their energy consumption and create data relating to energy costs and carbon emissions.

“When I first started thinking about this subject a few years ago, it seemed really far-fetched. I constantly had to remind people that climate change was a very real issue. These days, there’s no doubt in anyone’s mind, so we’ve been able to move on to the next question: what can we do about it?”

IT, she is convinced, has a huge role to play in the race to develop energy and carbon management products and she plans to spend “at least the next year to two years” exploring this area.

That’s the most fulfilling part of her work, she says – identifying the next wave of technology and anticipating the needs of users.

This kind of work, she adds, demands “stubbornness and optimism”, because, inevitability, any technologist’s blue-sky research tends to attract detractors. “Luckily, I have both those qualities,” she jokes.

But the work she does is also deeply anchored in the reality of today’s businesses, so she spends a lot of time visiting CIOs, hearing about the challenges their organisations are facing.

Understandably, there is no end to the number of visitors to the Sophia Antipolis campus, which sits in pine-scented foothills within easy reach of Riviera hotspots, such as Nice and Cannes.

Born and educated in Paris, Ms Mesnage studied engineering at the city’s École Polytechnique and moved on to postgraduate studies in image processing, pattern recognition and robotics at the École de Techniques Avancées.

But the advent of the dot-com boom and the opportunity of an internship at geospatial mapping start-up Istar took her to the Riviera, where she has remained.

“I was ready to leave Paris and see other places,” she says. Eight years on, she is the mother of two children, aged six and one, and feels “very lucky” that Accenture’s flexible working policies allow her to work four days out of five.

“The rest of the time is for my children, for my family. I describe myself as a mother, a wife and an IT professional. All three roles are extremely important to me.”