Joanne Maguire never set out to work in aerospace, much less lead a 16,000-employee company with about $8 billion in annual sales.
She thought she would be a math teacher. So when people ask how she got to where she is today — executive vice president of Lockheed Martin Space Systems — Maguire grins and says, “I just fell into it.”
It took a lot of persistence to become one of Fortune magazine’s 50 Most Powerful Women in Industry several years in a row.
Maguire was the fifth-oldest of 12 siblings. Their father was an aerospace engineer who couldn’t talk much about what he did. But he and their mother stressed education, holding their children to a high standard.
With such a large family, there were lots of chores to do. Maguire doesn’t recall much in the way of gender difference in assignments. The big ones took care of the littler ones, and the art of compromise was learned early.
Maguire remembers just a handful of other women in her electrical engineering classes at Michigan State University, and no women on the faculty.
Still, “that never really impinged on me,” she said. A tall woman who has been called “wicked smart,” Maguire acknowledges she was “pretty visible” through her education that included a master’s in engineering from UCLA.
Maguire joined TRW’s space and electronics division, now called Northrop Grumman Space Technology, and moved in 2003 to Lockheed Martin. She assumed her current position in 2006.
To bring more young women into the field, the time to intervene is in middle school when girls get the “subliminal message that girls don’t do this,” Maguire said.
That’s when they need to be engaged with problem-solving.
Two pieces of advice Maguire has for young engineers: “Be passionate about what you are doing” and “Think long and hard before you turn down an assignment.”
She recalls a couple of assignments that she took on after two or three people had said no, adding, “I never turned them down.”
