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…
“Now I understand why my mother warned me that the birth of one’s first child leads many women to throw in the professional towel,” smiles Céline, mother of Théodore, who is just a few months old, and head of the software development team at Cerbair, which supplies governments with anti-drone solutions. She admits that becoming a mother has changed her relationship to work, adding that she finds it exhausting to start a second day once the office day (or, for the moment, home-working day) is over, even if her spouse fully plays his part…
Mandy Hickson was the UK’s second female Tornado GR4 pilot. She has the personality one would expect from a woman who had to beat her own path towards a goal she’d been told as a girl was unattainable. She’s lucid, funny and very charismatic. And not somebody you mess with…
Céline is not a medical doctor but a doctor of computer sciences. Enthusiastic, chatty and keen to explain her job, she’s not at all like Lisbeth Salander, the hacker in Swedish author Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy. And she doesn’t wear hooded sweatshirts either! “On the contrary I wear a dress and necklaces every day and it’s very important to me, as well as to my female colleagues, that we look feminine” laughs this woman who is, today, a cybersecurity architect at Airbus CyberSecurity, a branch of Airbus Defense & Space…
Just this once you won’t see Louise’s face because she’s an “intelligence officer – tactical coordinator” on remotely piloted air systems (drones in other words, or RPASs) in the French Air and Space Force so a bit of discretion is in order (…) She is amongst the first to do this job that didn't even exist 12 years ago. But as a child Louise was far from imagining a career in the Air Force. "I had a really strong bond with my grandfather, who was an officer in the Foreign Legion. We would spend long hours riding together, him on his horse and me on my pony." She laughs that "even if I have two brothers, he considered me to be the little soldier of the family…”
When Anne was studying at the École Polytechnique it was mandatory for all students to spend a year in the military. A keen traveller, she thought that spending this time on a ship would be a great way to see new places. “And that’s how I found myself aboard ship for eight months after three months at the Naval College. And I loved it!” From then on, apart from a brief incursion into the oil industry, Anne has always worked in the naval sector. Today she is in charge of the new French nuclear attack submarine (SNLE) programme at Naval Group. Not one to blow her own trumpet, she omitted to tell me that in September 2018 she had won the “Jury’s Special Prize”, one of the 12 trophies awarded by the magazine L’Usine nouvelle to women who’ve had a remarkable career in industry…
