These Awesome Women Engineers are Taking Charge in 2018

     In honor of International Women’s Day 2018 we’re celebrating a bunch of our favorite females revolutionizing the engineering field. These women succeed daily in roles dominated largely by men. While the number of women studying engineering has increased globally in recent years, only 13 percent stay in the workforce. One recent study by MIT discovered that the drop stems from often-less-qualified male counterparts relegating women to menial tasks. However, these women clearly didn’t let anything – or anyone – stop them.

     For female engineers proving themselves, for young girls wanting to pursue the STEM fields or learn to code, this list is for you:

Marissa Mayer

     This IT executive and current CEO of Yahoo! can do just about everything. She attended Stanford University with the intention of becoming a pediatric neurosurgeon. However, she graduated with honors and earned her bachelor’s degree in symbolic systems. Two years later, she earned her Master’s in computer science. She joined Google, becoming the company’s first female engineer in 1999.

     Mayer is no stranger to controversy and tough decisions. Mayer recently dealt with several security breaches mishandled by senior executives early into her role as CEO. Rather than place blame elsewhere, Mayer took responsibility and requested that her annual bonus and grant be redistributed to Yahoo employees.

Reates Curry

     Ford Motor Company knew what it was doing when it hired Curry. This biomedical engineering specialist used her distinctive background to innovate driver assistance and other technology for Ford vehicles. She’s also been granted the company’s Henry Ford Technology Award – twice.

Peggy Johnson

     Johnson isn’t just one of the brightest engineering minds, she’s also one of tech world’s best businesspeople. This former electrical engineer currently serves as executive vice president of Business Development at Microsoft. She led Microsoft’s $26 billion takeover of LinkedIn. She developed partnerships Salesforce, Dropbox and Uber. She’s also on Microsoft’s 12-person senior executive board.

Kimberly Bryant

     Bryant boasts an entire career most engineers (both male or female) could only imagine. She got her training in electrical engineering before pharmaceutical companies’ chief IT director and programmer. Bryant noticed that throughout her career, there was a severe lack of women and people of color in her work. She founded Black Girls Code in 2011, and since then, it’s become one of the world’s leading coding resources for young children.

Yoky Matsuoka

     Yoky Matsuoka is a hot commodity among major tech companies. In January, Google parent company Alphabet’s executives seemed thrilled when she announced her return to the company. She stepped back into her role as CTO of Nest, where she’ll no doubt continue to develop AI for the home. Matsuoka very briefly worked as CEO of Quanttus, a health data startup. She worked for Apple in 2016 on some hush-hush health tech before returning to Alphabet.

Joy Dunn

     While Elon Musk might be the first name that pops into your head when you hear “SpaceX,” Joy Dunn plays a crucial role in giving Musk something to celebrate. Dunn leads the aerospace company’s New Product Innovation. She basically keeps everything in check for existing rocket programs while brainstorming production on new features. Prior to joining SpaceX, she was the senior manager for Dragon engineering. She led the engineering team responsible for crafting the Dragon rocket ship.

Maggie Aderin-Pocock

     Aderin-Pocock discovered she had dyslexia at a very young age, but her passions for space propelled her beyond the limits of her reading disability. She studied at the Imperial College London where she earned her PhD in mechanical engineering in 1994. The London native worked for the UK Ministry of Defence and later helped develop a high-resolution spectrograph for the Gemini telescope. She remains one of the most outspoken activists toward getting children involved in the sciences, particularly aeronautics engineering.

Ellen Ochoa

     After a legendary career with NASA, Ochoa currently serves as Director of the Johnson Space Center. In 1993, Ellen Ochoa made headlines as the first Hispanic woman to ever go into space. She flew aboard the Discovery space shuttle as the payload commander. In total, Ochoa logged almost 1,000 hours of flight time in space. She also holds a doctorate in electrical engineering and three patents for optical systems all used by NASA. Ochoa currently serves on several NASA boards. She’s a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and she promotes females in aeronautics.