Marie-Solange is the director of the land and naval sector within Optronics and Missile Electronics at Thales. Appointed to the job in September 2021, the 37-year old found herself at the helm of a team that, apart from one other young woman, consists exclusively of men over the age of 50 who “have daughters my age!” She smiles. “It was my youth that surprised them rather than my gender,” she remarks.

The career path of this electronic engineer is atypical, even if she says she merely followed in the footsteps of her father and brother, both of whom are engineers. Her first steps were the classic ones for a French engineer: a scientific baccalaureate followed by a year or two of extensive studying for the competitive exams to get into the top engineering schools, and her successful bid to get a place at Supélec (known as CentralSupélec since 2015). It was in her final year there that she stepped off the beaten path, jumping at the opportunity for a place at the Georgia Institute of Technology (better known simply as Georgia Tech) in Atlanta, Georgia, United States. A university of 16,000 students compared to fewer than 2,000 for Supélec. And Atlanta is not Gif-sur-Yvette!! “I'd always wanted to go to the USA but it's true that it was very difficult. For six months I didn’t understand enough to be able to take any notes,” she laughs. But today her American accented English is fluent.

With an MSc in hand in 2006, she decided to stay in the United States, but left the Deep South and Georgia for the West Coast and California where she landed a job at Qualcomm in San Diego “where I was basically designing chips”, whilst maintaining a long-distance relationship with her fiancé, met at Supélec, who had stayed in France.

Benjamin, a petrochemical engineer, joined her in 2010 when she changed employers and workplaces, swapping Qualcomm for Texas Instruments and the relaxed lifestyle of a seaside town in California for a different one in the flatness of Texas: Dallas. Her words are sparse but her face says it all! Texas did not suit the couple despite their beautiful brick house in a leafy residential area. Her employer left her few opportunities to evolve towards the business side, probably because she returned brilliant technical results with two patents published. So, after two and a half years the couple threw in the towel, moving back across the Atlantic to settle in London where Marie-Solange studied for an MBA at the London Business School.

She then worked for McKinsey for three years but quickly reoriented her work “and spent 50% of my time doing digital transformation.” In 2018 she was contacted by a headhunter seeking a chief of staff for Patrice Caine, the CEO of Thales. “Curious”, she went along to the interview and found in Caine a real desire to hire more women and a “very humane person for whom it is very important to maintain a balance between personal and professional lives!” So for three years she directed the CEO’s office, preparing meetings, writing speeches and discovering the Thales group in all its complexity, with its civil/military duality and its different divisions (civil and military aeronautics, land and naval defence, security, space, and transport). She took Caine’s life balance philosophy to heart and a baby son quickly joined her four-year-old daughter, allowing her to take “maternity leave which went very well.”

Then, when Thales offered her the job she holds today, she took time to think about what is important to her in her professional life “because I need meaning. I realised that for me, working in the defense sector meant I would be using my skills for the benefit of my country.”

Marie-Solange concedes that some of her friends “query” her job in defence but she argues that her work contributes to “enabling my country to be sovereign.” She wishes more people were prepared to “serve our country.”

She says she has not been subjected to inappropriate remarks in her new job despite the surprise her youth aroused. “Teams want a leader who takes decisions,” she says. She feels rewarded by comments like the one proffered by a colleague who admitted that he “hugely” admired her “motivation”.

Motivation that also applies to her personal life. Despite having a nanny and a husband who “does all the cooking” and shares 50% of the household chores, “you have to be very, very organised,” she stresses, so that both members of the couple can pursue interesting careers and enjoy family life.