Lisa Åbom is amongst the top female executives in Swedish defence company Saab. She’s the chief technology officer for aeronautics, a position created a year ago that she is the first to hold. At the end of our 45-minute conversation I’ve understood that this charming woman has an iron fist inside a velvet glove…
Alexis (silent -s) designs warships. Always has done. As a child she covered pages with colourful drawings of them. But, unlike any of the other women I’ve portrayed to date, she was a failure at school which is hard to imagine when chatting with this extremely articulate, vivacious, sporty young woman whose mind works as fast as quicksilver…
“I don't like the term 'work/personal life balance' because I don't want to compromise,” says Amelia Gould, systems engineer, former Royal Navy lieutenant, currently chief of staff to the BAE Systems CEO and mother of two! “It's not so much a balance as a conscious choice and I'll concentrate on whatever needs attention at that moment. If there's a work project deadline then that gets my attention and if its one of my children's birthdays or they are ill then that is my priority,” she explains…
Don’t disregard the importance of holiday experiences: they can become the defining moment of one’s life. Such is the case with Stéphanie who discovered sailing whilst on holiday when she was 18 and was hooked! So, obviously, she chose the navy for the mandatory year of military training at French engineering school Polytechnique…
“I don't fit into any pre-conceived boxes,” laughs this athletic woman (she runs half-marathons) who currently holds a job at France's Naval Group that she invented herself: Managing Director, Collaborative Innovation and R&D Programmes. She started bucking the trend early on. At school Béatrice's teachers pushed her into doing biology rather than the physics and chemistry she loved, probably because it was considered more suitable for a girl. So she dutifully passed her Bac D (science with a biology major) school-leaving exam and started studying biology at university…
Few people know a woman colonel was in charge on January 9, 2015, when the Kouachi brothers -- who two days earlier had perpetrated a terrorist attack against the satirical weekly Le Canard Enchaîné -- holed up in a printing shop in Dammartin-en-Goële. Anne Fougerat was the colonel…
