All tagged Renault

Lance-corporal Amandine

Lance-corporal Amandine

Christina Mackenzie
Army

Amandine joined the French Army's Ad Hoc Regiment of Chad* as a mechanic when she was 19. That was two years ago. It was a period when many youngsters chose to join the armed forces or the police in the wake of a series of terrorist attacks in France. But “my choice was not inspired by these attacks,” she explains. It was simply that she has a vocational certificate in automobile mechanics and a vocational bacalaureate and thought the army might be the best place to exericise her talents as a mechanic…

Joan Gibert

Joan Gibert

Christina Mackenzie
Land armaments industry

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…