All in Land armaments industry
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…
Graziella smiles: she was "not at all planning to work either for the defence sector or in industry.” Yet today she is the quality manager and member of the management board at the Arquus plant in Garchizy, on the banks of the Loire in the centre of France, where she has been involved in working on armoured vehicles for the past 15 years.It’s a world far removed from the educational one that Graziella thought she would join as a teacher when she began studying biology…
Lydia is proof incarnate that being a mechanical engineer is not the boring job many might imagine. Today this elegant, ambitious young woman is the programme and development director of the defence business unit at Texelis, where she’s responsible for the Serval programme, the 4×4 multi-role armoured vehicle the company is building for the French Army with its partner Nexter…
Nathalie is an engineer, a welding expert at Nexter Systems, the French state-owned manufacturer of armoured vehicles and the iconic Leclerc tank, where she is responsible for the mechanically welded structures skills centre. “I find it gratifying that our work is to protect the military. It’s our primary goal,” she says during our video conversation…
She was named for the singer her parents love: Joan Baez. But the normal French version of the name is Jeanne whilst the masculine version is Johan. As her name more closely resembles the latter, when teachers read the name they expected to see a boy. “No, I'm a girl!” she'd say, explaining with a laugh that this might be why she has never considered her gender as an impediment to anything she might want to do. “It's never even crossed my mind to question whether my job is a 'man's job' or a 'woman's job',” she tells me over coffee in my first face-to-face interview since the Covid-19 pandemic broke out in March…
Sophie is the production line manager and number two in the pecking order at the Arquus factory in Limoges which manufactures armoured vehicles for the French army and for export. “Every month we have production targets to meet and it's my responsibility to make sure that happens,” she says. It's a factory floor job and she likes it that way…
