Colonel Julie

Julie in the uniform she doesn’t have to wear to work every day. Photo credit: DGA

When Julie was a child she dreamed of one day marching in the military parade down the Champs Elysées on Bastille Day, 14th July. She did so in 2005, dressed in the military skirt and boots (“awfully hot,” she laughs) uniform of a female student at the prestigious École Polytechnique. She remembers having “a few butterflies before the parade, but once you start marching, you forget the stage fright. It went by super quickly,” she marvels. 

““I wanted to work for my country, to wear a uniform and to do an engineering job.””

Julie says that, curiously, not all students at the École Polytechnique want to parade on July 14. “There are those who’ve already gone on holiday or are doing an internship, those who simply don’t want to and those who just cannot march in step and are therefore automatically eliminated,” she laughs. But as she had both the desire and the marching ability, she was able to make her dream come true, with her proud parents as witnesses, “because they always encouraged me to aim high,” she remarks.

Julie admits to a lifelong passion for uniforms, particularly naval ones, at one time even considering signing up in the navy. But, keen on maths and physics, she wanted to be an engineer and found “that in the navy there isn’t enough of the type of engineering work I wanted to do.” 

It was during a career forum that she discovered a profession she’d never heard of until then: armaments engineer, which corresponded exactly to her desiderata: “I wanted to work for my country, to wear a uniform and to do an engineering job.” 

Armament engineers are very specific to France. In collaboration with the armed forces and industry, they develop and manage armaments programmes, supervising every stage from the definition to final delivery to the forces. They are senior military executives and constitute the large procurement arm of the French Ministry of the Armed Forces, known as the Direction Générale de l'Armement (DGA).

Being military they hold ranks but with other names than those to which we are accustomed. Julie, for example, is Chief Weapons Engineer, which is equivalent to the rank of Colonel. So on her uniform she wears five stripes (two plus three). 

Even if there are many paths to joining the DGA depending on one’s speciality, education and military or civilian status, most armament engineers are graduates of the École Polytechnique (familiarly known in France as X) and then of another applied technology institution. Julie, like many of her peers, chose the National School of Advanced Techniques (ENSTA).

At Polytechnique, Julie took all the naval options. She did her internship in naval aviation. In the DGA she’s followed a “fairly classical” career patch except for a stint as chief of staff and a position in finance to acquire budgetary skills.

Today she is the director of a naval programme. “That means that I manage a team and together we all pull together so that the product delivered to the armed forces meets all their requirements.” Despite her young age and her gender, she says she’s never had a problem of legitimacy at work “and I’ve never felt that being a woman has been penalizing for the advancement of my career.” But she concedes that “the older generation of women paved the way for those of my generation and I appreciate how lucky I am today.” 

Julie is not in this photo but she wore the same uniform as this class of 2013 at the École Polytechnique. Photo credit: Jérémy Barande, Creative Commons

It must be said that the DGA is making efforts to ensure its women engineers stay. There are three crèches within the Ministry of the Armed Forces in the south-west of Paris, which means Julie can easily leave her baby and her toddler there. In addition, thanks to the Covid pandemic she can now divide her time between working from home and going to the office “because it’s important to see my team. But I’ve insisted that any meetings must end at 5:30 p.m.” She avoids travel if at all possible; otherwise she makes her trips short. For her, working from home is nothing short of “miraculous”, because “it’s become totally acceptable and this enhances the attractiveness of jobs here, both for young fathers and young mothers. This flexibility makes life less stressful, particularly in Paris, even if it's not easy every day!”

When she was a student at X she used to worry about how she would balance her career and her desire to start a family. Her stay-at-home mother had warned her that “with children it's going to be difficult.” But “in fact it was my colleagues who reassured me, with many examples of women in the DGA having an interesting career and children,” she says. Julie in turn advises young engineers in their first job, to “save some energy for home in order to keep a balance between their professional career and their private life.”