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…
When Julie was a child she dreamed of one day marching in the military parade down the Champs Elysées on Bastille Day, 14th July. She did so in 2005, dressed in the military skirt and boots (“awfully hot,” she laughs) uniform of a female student at the prestigious École Polytechnique. She remembers having “a few butterflies before the parade, but once you start marching, you forget the stage fright. It went by super quickly,” she marvels…
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…
Déborah is tended to like a top athlete by her employer, Naval Group. Why? Because she's a gold medalist. She didn’t win her medal at the Beijing Winter Olympics earlier this month but rather after three days of competition at WorldskillsFrance in the "welding" category in early January. However, just like the winter sports athletes, she’ll also go to China to compete in the Worldskills international finals in Shanghai from 12-17 October 2022…
Funny, playful, jovial and dynamic, Amandine will doubtless have no trouble at all adapting to her new life this summer when she ends her 16-year career as a contract officer in the French Navy to join her military husband in the United States. So will begin a third professional life for this young mechanical engineer, who only joined the Navy in 2006 at the age of 27, "the ceiling" to sign-up as a contract officer…
