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Defense is at the forefront of public consciousness and political budgeting. Projects are getting more scrutiny, moving along faster, and requiring more advanced technology and more trained personnel. And women are more important than ever in initiating and managing projects, helping to keep national defense strong.
"I was often the only woman in the room at my first job," says Maria Gutierrez, project engineering manager for software on three Navy products at UK-based BAE Systems' Greenlawn, NY site. "Nowadays I work with about 30 percent women."
Although there is more money available now, the pressure to get more for the dollar runs across all defense contracting. Commercially available products are used whenever possible. Any new projects or jobs need to meet clear needs before they open up. "The big concern is performing within cost and on schedule," says Gutierrez.
Management development at Honeywell Aerospace
A long downturn in defense funding during the 1990s has left some gaps in women's participation at mid-level management. But contractors and defense and homeland security organizations are finding ways to attract talented women to fill the roles.
Honeywell, for example, works closely with the Society of Women Engineers and Women in Aerospace to attract and retain women engineers. A third of its summer interns were women in 2004.
"We look at all avenues to make sure we have a diverse candidate slate to choose from," says Gretchen McClain, VP of engineering, technology and program management for Honeywell Engines, Systems and Services (Phoenix, AZ).
For example, a development program encourages talent within Honeywell, and there's careful scrutiny to ensure diversity, including women, within the group. The idea is to give good people the visibility and opportunities they need to prepare for management. They are assigned mentors and work on projects outside their main areas of responsibility.
Honeywell also sponsors a management resource review. It works with annual, strategic and five-year plans to identify likely folks, both male and female, majority and minority, and make sure they get the support they need.
"It's about taking a deep look into the organization and how people are performing," McClain says. "We think not only about how they're doing today, but how they can do in the future."
Gretchen McClain: leader in a worldwide Honeywell business
Gretchen McClain's organization supports five enterprises staffed by more than 3,600 engineers worldwide. The products of the business include small gas turbine engines, auxiliary power units, electric power systems, air management systems and engine controls. Its development and production programs serve air transport, business and general aviation, and defense and space.
McClain's responsibilities include applying Six Sigma methodologies to velocity product design and development.
"I spend a lot of time understanding the requirements of the marketplace, matching the needs of our customers and our commitments to them," she says. "A key piece is to ensure that we have quality and product integrity for any product going on an aircraft. It's embedded in our culture to design it right in the first place."
McClain studied ME at the University of Utah, encouraged by her father, an aerospace engineer. She did an internship at Hercules Aerospace, where her father worked, which was later acquired by Alliant Techsystems Inc (Edina, MN).
When she received her BSME in 1984 she joined Hercules, working on composite materials feasibility studies for solid rocket motors for NASA shuttles. "I always wanted to be on the front end of product development," she says.
In 1989 she moved on to NASA as a systems engineer on the International Space Station program. Ten years later, she left a position as deputy associate administrator for human space flight at NASA's Washington, DC HQ to become program management VP at AlliedSignal Engines, Systems and Solutions. AlliedSignal merged with Honeywell soon afterward.
NASA was exciting, but "I wanted to get back to the commercial side of the house," McClain says. "The diversity of Honeywell's portfolio of products, as well as the diversity of its organization, background and culture, offers me more opportunities as a woman."
In 2001 she became VP of the Honeywell airframe business that makes systems for regional, business and general aviation aircraft. That's a $250-million business serving worldwide customers.
McClain has a black belt in Six Sigma. She serves on the board of the Challenger Space Center of Arizona and the engineering advisory board for Arizona State University, and is a member of the Arizona Technology Council.
McClain and her engineer husband, who runs his own business from their home, are both workaholics, she says with a laugh. But they do find time for golf.
Maria Gutierrez heads a group at defense contractor BAE Systems
BAE Systems' software project engineering manager Maria Gutierrez was born in Cuba and educated in Spain, at convent schools and the University of Madrid. She completed her education at Queens College (New York, NY), receiving a BSCS with a minor in math in 1984.
She started U Madrid majoring in chemistry. She changed her mind because of violent demonstrations near the chem building. "I thought, "How could it be that I get killed here after escaping from Cuba?'" she says. She moved to CS because the building was in a quieter part of the campus.
At BAE Systems Gutierrez leads a team of fifty software engineers in communications, navigation identification and reconnaissance. Their projects include reconnaissance cameras and mission computers installed on aircraft, and identification friend-or-foe (IFF) software.
"If somebody at the convent school had told me where I would be today, I would not have believed them," she says.
After college she worked for several consulting firms and learned about the world of commercial software. She was most interested in internal computer operating systems and databases, and found a job at BAE Systems as a programmer for embedded real-time systems. "It was on fighter planes that have to run on milliseconds," she says.
In the beginning there weren't many women techies at BAE Systems, certainly none with a convent school upbringing. She had a terrible time at her first few design review presentations.
These important development steps were always conducted in attack mode. A designer would describe the work to a group of about ten adversaries who would try to tear the design apart. The proceeding got very rough, and "Even sitting at the table and giving my opinion was very tough for me," Gutierrez remembers.
Gradually she understood that the criticism was intended to attack the design, not the designer, and was an essential quality step. But the men were learning, too. "They began to modify their language, or at least say, "Excuse me, Maria,'" she says with a laugh.
"This is the environment of computer development, but I certainly think that the way they cleaned it up made the meetings better," she says.
She left BAE Systems in 2000 to work for a consulting firm for a year and a half, but now she's back. "When you build something in the defense industry, you feel so proud because it's going to be used to defend the country and save lives," she says. "Our work has tremendous meaning."
After an hour-long commute, Gutierrez comes home to her EE husband and teenage son. Her parents and two sisters live nearby. Someday, she says, she hopes to find time to enjoy doing the fine needle-crafting she learned from the nuns.
Yvonne Cook is a systems analyst at SYColeman
Yvonne Cook started her career in the Army, practiced her IT there, and is now a systems analyst for defense contractor SYColeman (Arlington, VA). She has worked for the company since 2001.
SYColeman, a wholly-owned subsidiary of L-3 Communications, was formed in 2003 from the merger of SY Technology and Coleman Research Corp. The company provides critical space and missile defense products and services, like computer network ops for defense and attack, network security planning, ops research, requirements analysis and missile test planning and support.
Cook's specialty is projects for the Missile Defense Agency (MDA). Her Army time gave her the security clearance she needs for the job.
She divides her time between sites in Crystal City and Roslyn, VA. At Crystal City she's on the helpdesk, guiding MDA users through the enterprise portal systems. Roslyn offers a change of pace: she tests system upgrades and new Web-based apps. As a member of the Web engineering team, she works with techies from other government contractors.
Cook grew up in Aiken, SC, the thirteenth of fourteen children. She went to college for two years, then joined the Army as a route to further education.
She entered as a private and took all the college courses she could while posted in Korea, El Paso, TX and Fort Meyer, VA. She received a diploma in networking and system admin, and completed her BSCIS at Strayer University (Washington, DC) in 2003.
Cook worked in logistics during most of her six years in the Army, but in 1999 she became part of the Army's equal opportunity program staff. She enjoyed diversity training with the Old Guard unit at Fort Meyer.
It was the President's ceremonial unit, and had just begun accepting women. "They were not used to having women in the unit at all, let alone a woman who outranked them," she says.
When Cook left the Army in 2000, she held the rank of sergeant. Now happily settled in defense contracting, Cook sees her next career steps in areas like systems management and technical documentation. But she remains interested in diversity counseling. "Especially after 9/11, there's a great need for diversity training," she says.
Government agencies help with education
Educational opportunities abound in government agencies and private industry as well. The military, for example, offers management training and War College degrees to civilians as well as active military. It's a route that has helped women get the training they need to advance without attending a military academy.
Los Alamos National Laboratory's new director's development program, started in 2003, offers a year of management training.
"It's a very personalized program to create more upward mobility at the lab, very different from anything we've done in the past," says Steve Sandoval, lab spokesperson. The program is open to all group leaders; minorities and women are encouraged to apply.
Capt Deborah McGhee heads a C4 section for the Navy
Capt Deborah Mc-Ghee of the U.S. Navy is a good example of the training available on active military service. She's the information professional heading the transition and implementation section for the Navy's command, control, communications and computers (C4) branch. C4 falls within the space, information warfare, command and control division of the warfare requirements and programs directorate on the staff of the Chief of Naval Operations (CNO).
From her office in Crystal City, MD, McGhee directs the integration of C4 programs for the six-year plan of the Department of Defense (DOD). The plan works to meet fleet requirements while implementing FORCEnet, a new ultra-secure DOD-wide communications network.
"Information professionals are the Navy's preeminent warriors, expert in our craft," she says. "We connect the fleet."
McGhee joined the Naval ROTC as a junior at the University of South Carolina because it would pay for her last two years of college. She received her BSCS in 1982, planning to spend a few years in the Navy and then move to private industry.
She began her military career as an unrestricted line officer. She completed an MSCS at the Naval Postgraduate School (Monterey, CA) in 1989 and an MS in national security strategy with an emphasis on information strategy at the National War College of the National Defense University at Fort McNair (Washington, DC) in 1999.
She has just completed the advanced management program of the National Defense University's Information Resource Management College (Fort Lesley J. McNair, Washington, DC), earning CIO and information assurance certificates.
McGhee moved to her current position in 2001 from an assignment as commanding officer at Navy Computer and Telecom Station Keflavik in Iceland. She expects to work in the CIO office for the Secretary of the Navy now that she's received her most recent management credentials.
"Opportunities don't drop in your lap, but they are abundant in the Navy," she says. "You don't get stale because they transfer you every three years. If you don't like what you're doing, just stay strong."
Dr Y. Kim manages projects at the CIA
Y. Kim, PhD, works for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA, Washington, DC). She's a research scientist, working on R&D projects in the office of advanced technologies and programs (ATP).
She works on several projects at once, sometimes as project manager, sometimes as a supporting team member. ATP works with universities, other government agencies, government labs and private contractors.
Kim's responsibilities are in project and contract management. She's mostly been involved with projects exploring computer vision: algorithms to detect and interpret actions and activities, rather than requiring human observers to watch monitors 24/7.
Kim and her family came to the U.S. from her native Korea in 1975. She had planned to be a dentist, but found herself more interested in engineering and earned a 1983 BS in civil engineering at the University of Washington. "There were a lot of things I wanted to build," she says.
She spent a fellowship year at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden, receiving her MS in 1986. Her thesis was on underwater structural inspection using videocameras.
She completed her PhD in 1990, with a dissertation on temporal and three-dimensional analysis of structural deformation.
Two of her mentors, a research chief and a senior scientist, recruited her for the CIA. "I was so excited, my heart wasn't in it to interview with anyone else," she recalls.
She joined the agency as a junior research scientist and found herself working with a professor whose textbooks she had studied in school.
Kim was recently part of a rotational program that took her into the front office of the director of science and technology and exposed her to management training. Now she's considering changing her career direction from technology to management.
"It was a really good experience to see how decisions are made at a corporate level," she says. "It's a different perspective from what I had as a scientist."
She observes that many women hold senior positions at the agency. But even when she was the only woman studying under her advisor in grad school, "It's never been a drawback. The men save seats for you," she says with a smile.
Kim is married to a computer scientist who also works for the agency. With two children, they appreciate the CIA's flexibility toward family responsibilities.
Essye Miller: a civilian in the military
A civil-service career with the military can be a great opportunity for women who would like to both practice their technical skills and serve the country, but want to do it without an active-duty obligation. Civilians fill many roles in today's military, as it seeks to adapt technology from the commercial world to its own uses.
The DOD, for example, likes to use commercial software whenever it can. That's what Essye Miller's work for the Air Force involves.
Miller is chief of the C4 enterprise support division in the directorate of communications and ops. She's assigned to the Pentagon, and her division is responsible for planning strategy and implementation policy for communications and computer technologies that support enterprise-level IT needs.
"We are here to help our war fighters. We provide the resources to meet the IT needs of the people who are at the pointy end of the spear," she says.
"Let's face it, everyone uses IT today. As functional capabilities are automated and move to the network, we make sure the Air Force infrastructure is robust enough to support them and protect their information."
Miller leads strategy meetings to set IT direction for the Air Force, and she regularly assesses current commercial technologies to determine how well they meet Air Force needs.
Although Miller is a civilian, she recently completed ten months of senior level training at the Air War College (Montgomery, AL). The college averages 250 people, only about fifteen of them civilians. When they graduate, civilians typically move into more responsible positions.
"The services schools are a good way to make sure civilian employees have the same training and experiences that active-duty military have," Miller says. "My goal is to be an interchangeable partner with my military peers."
Miller earned her BA in business admin at Talladega College (Talladega, AL) in 1985. She earned her MBA in 1995 from Troy (AL) State University.
She was recruited as an IS specialist at Maxwell-Gunter AFB Annex (Montgomery, AL), starting as an intern in a program to recruit top talent. The Air Force program "challenged me in a variety of functional areas," she remembers.
In 1993 she was selected as chief of the airborne command and control branch at Langley AFB (Hampton, VA), part of the air combat command staff. "That put me right in the mix of everything that was going on after the Gulf War," she says.
She was responsible for leading command and control software integration efforts for Air Force fighters and bombers. "We worked with software aboard all the aircraft under the air combat command umbrella," she says.
In 1995 she was chosen for a ten-month development course in Montgomery, AL, then came back to Langley in the space and satellite command and control systems branch. She went from there to a career-broadening assignment at the Pentagon.
That put her into a variety of jobs over the next two years, ranging from strategic IT planning and acquiring various IT programs to writing speeches and briefings for senior IT leaders. She also led the implementation of technologies like smart cards and public-key infrastructure, part of bringing e-business capabilities to the Air Force population of 700,000.
Miller has a four-year-old son and a husband who's a retired Air Force pilot, now flying commercially. Her job is high-pressure and there are plenty of late nights, but she believes she made a great career choice. "I've had an exciting career and am proud of my accomplishments so far," she says. "I look forward to the challenges and opportunities ahead of me."
Dr Denise Nicholson helps run a NAVAIR science office
Denise Nicholson, PhD, is deputy director of the science and technology office of the Orlando, FL training systems division of the Naval Air Systems Command (NAVAIR). She oversees training that helps people on active duty utilize new technology as it becomes available.
The office is the main conduit for external funding, most of which comes from the Office of Naval Research (ONR), so Nicholson finds herself proposing large programs to the Navy and DOD, then finding subcontractors and reviewing their proposals for handling the work. Programs often go into the millions and bring together universities, Navy and other government labs, and companies large and small.
"One of the big challenges is conveying what we are doing to the public," she says. "What are all these scientists doing that is going to have an effect on the war fighters? How is that going to help the Marines in Iraq?"
Nicholson develops, plans and leads the execution of R&D programs for the ONR, NAVAIR and other agencies. As an ONR human systems development liaison, she's a principal agent for development of science and technology programs. "A proposed budget could have fifty line items, from $30,000 to fund a student at a university to a million for a major contractor to perform an integration task," she says.
A 1986 AS in engineering science from Mohawk Valley Community College (Utica, NY) started Nicholson on her way. She went on to a BS in EE and computer engineering from Clarkson University (Potsdam, NY) in 1988.
Then she started working for the Air Force at Griffiths AFB (Rome, NY). She was an electronics technician, then an engineer, in photonics, which she describes as using light to carry information, as in CDs and DVDs.
The Air Force sponsored Nicholson's 1991 MS and 1997 PhD in optical sciences at the University of Arizona. It was part of a plan to increase the educational level of talented young Air Force employees in anticipation of the retirement of older career employees. "They offered me a tremendous opportunity," she says.
She transferred to NAVAIR in 1997 as an electronics engineer on a team that included industrial and experimental psychologists and computer scientists. She also shifted her focus from optics to training and simulation. The idea, she says, is "to help the different disciplines work together more cohesively and translate the work to customers and sponsors."
In 2003, she moved up to her post of deputy director of the science and technology office in NAVAIR's training systems division. Her background in optics helps her, she notes. "You need to match the realism of the system to the task you are trying to train," she says.
The Army, Air Force and Marines all have offices near her Orlando, FL location. There's also the advantage of Disney as a local partner. "Disney's idea is to create realism for entertainment, but we can leverage some of the technologies Disney uses for our own purposes," she says.
Also helpful are the resources of the University of Central Florida, where she sits on the board of industrial affiliates.
Nicholson's engineer and pilot husband has taken a sabbatical from the working world to care for their infant son at home. She's also grateful for the generous sick leave and maternity leave in government service, and the flexibility to work core hours.
Dr Barbara Martinez supports weapons at Los Alamos
Barbara Martinez, PhD, leads the nuclear materials science group of Los Alamos National Laboratory's nuclear materials technology division. The group characterizes nuclear material, measures its properties, and investigates other materials in support of the nuclear weapons program.
The lab's overall mission has expanded from the surveillance and certification tasks of the 1980s and "90s to include manufacturing and stockpile stewardship.
"There's more emphasis on aging in the stockpile," Martinez says. "We now rely more on the work my group does and on computer simulations, rather than underground tests."
Martinez's group numbers about a hundred, including materials science pros and support staff. They're located on two sites at the New Mexico complex of more than forty square miles.
She stays close to her group members' work with regular walk-arounds. "I go where my people are doing their experimental work, to be sure they know that management takes an interest," she says.
Although neither of her parents completed college, education was important to Martinez's East Texas family. She relied on scholarships while earning a 1972 BS in physics at Stephen F. Austin State University (Nacogdoches, TX), followed by an MS in condensed matter physics in 1973. Her 1980 PhD in physics is from Texas A&M (College Station, TX).
Martinez joined Los Alamos in 1980 as a post-doctoral student, part of the lab's active pipeline. Today, she notes, student programs bring 1,900 students, from high school through post-doc, to the lab annually.
After several years at the lab, she moved to private industry for a year. She worked at a McDonnell Douglas site in Houston, TX, then returned to Los Alamos for the real work of her career.
Martinez met and married another Los Alamos staffer. She worked part time as a technical staff member when her children, a son now eighteen and a daughter now twelve, were younger.
Back at the lab fulltime, she went from supervising one or two people to fifteen or twenty as a team leader. In 2000 she became deputy group leader, and group leader the next year. She recently completed the director's development program as a member of its first class.
She was one of the few women in physics when she was in school, but Martinez sees more women entering the field now. The lab's changing mission means changing procedures and more controls, she notes. "It's a stringent environment and there's a lot to learn on the job."
Mentors and networks
All these women value the help others have given them along the way. In addition to a wide variety of professional organizations like the Society of Women Engineers (www.swe. org), the Armed Forces Communications and Electronic Association (www.afcea.org) and specific groups related to their particular interests, they've all found formal and informal connections to help support their career growth.
Honeywell, for example, has a formal mentoring program, and in addition, Gretchen McClain recommends developing a personal network of mentors. "My network of people I can confide in has been helpful in trying new ideas," she says. "I make sure I don't lose contact with the people I trust."
Dr Denise Nicholson of NAVAIR had two mentors in the senior exec management development program from which she recently graduated. Good mentors tend to ask more questions than they answer, she notes.
Military or civilian: the women speak
Her Army stint launched Yvonne Cook into her corporate career. "The military opened up opportunities I might not have had otherwise," she says.
Dr Nicholson of NAVAIR didn't consider joining the military, but she's always worked alongside uniformed techies. "There are tremendous opportunities for making a shift between agencies and programs in government work," she says.
Dr Kim notes that the CIA is "generous with training." Her regular department was willing to give up her services while she did a front office rotation. "They lost a year of my time, and they were willing to do that for my long-term development," she says.
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