Dayna Johnson had one of those a-ha career moments while visiting GE Gas Power’s Advanced Manufacturing Works, a state-of-the-art facility for new-make process and repair development in Greenville, South Carolina, this spring. Hung on a wall was an oversize poster of Thomas Edison, emblazoned with a few of his very wise words.
When Bobbi Eldrid and Lynda Kaufman discovered they were both expecting their first children, they began chatting about an age-old struggle. “We were asking ourselves, ‘How do you balance being a mom with having a challenging role and a fulfilling career path?’” Eldrid says. Now they have been sharing a job at GE Power for almost two decades.
Mary Reynolds stood on the train platform and waved her parents goodbye. It was 1946, and the 20-year-old was trading the red dirt of Oklahoma for the frigid winters of Schenectady, New York, and an engineering job at GE.
Of the 7.1 billion people in the world, men make up eighteen percent and women sixteen percent of people who are online. That means there are 200 million fewer women online. And when women are offline, so is the global economy, writes Cheryl Miller Van Dyck, Co-founder and Executive Director of the Digital Leadership Institute.
The future is already here — it’s just not evenly distributed.
-William Gibson
“Most people probably wouldn’t say this, but I love hospitals,” says Lane Konkel. As a child growing up in Wisconsin, the 26-year-old lean manufacturing engineer would accompany her father, an orthopedic surgeon, to his office. “I’d play around with the little models of the knee and pull on the ligaments or I’d visit patients post surgery. For me, hospitals are connected to a lot of really great memories.”
Project Include started with eight women in tech who wanted to move diversity forward by having hard conversations. Co-founder Ellen Pao describes the group’s suggestions for improvement and which companies could have the biggest impact.
GE today announced goals of having 20,000 women to fill STEM roles at GE by 2020 and obtaining 50:50 representation for all our technical entry-level programs.