When a new employee is onboarded at GE Aerospace's Systems business in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Gail Thompson is often one of the first stops on the tour.
“They stop and say, ‘Oh, you have to meet Gail,’” she says. “I guess it’s just because I’ve been here a long time.”
One summer as a teenager, Christine Andrews visited NASA Mission Control Center in Houston with her family. Marveling at the spacecraft on display, she contemplated the thrill of contributing to space discovery. It wasn’t a stretch. She was already participating in high school symposiums for women in math and science. Yet the idea was daunting. “You look at all the buttons in the capsules and think, Who knows what all of these do, let alone how they all work beneath that?” she recalls.