Are you a Woman in STEM Leader who is Ready to Make a Difference?
Nominate yourself, or someone else, to be a Gotara STEM-career advisor.

Yumiko Damashek says that she has always been a people magnet. Part of that is her personality, but her other secret power growing up was her height. “I was a big kid,” she shared with us in our premiere REACH REPORT. “And big kids usually don’t get pushed around because kids think you have gravitas and presence already.” As a young woman, she knew she had “a bigger game to play,” which is why she left her native Japan and headed to San Diego State University to earn an MBA in international marketing and finance. Her last post before retiring was a VP role at Cabot Microelectronics (now known as CMC Materials). “I’m not an engineer, and without being willing to learn continually, I wouldn’t have survived,” she says. “I wouldn’t have won the trust of all those analytical types in my life. Ironically, though, engineers appreciated my big-picture approach to things, which wasn’t always science-driven. Life isn’t all about data and analysis; big decisions are often made using other considerations.”

Sometimes you choose a career; sometimes, a career chooses you. This could be said of Colleen Athans. “I don’t know how I ended up in engineering, considering there was no one in my family who had gone that route,” she told us for our premiere REACH REPORT. “But maybe it was more about luck than anything else.” And it was lucky for GE Aviation, where she worked for 34 years before taking the retirement she now enjoys. As vice president and general manager of Supply Chain at GE Aviation, she led 29,000 people in 12 countries. But Colleen, who has a bachelor’s in mechanical engineering from the University of Minnesota and a master’s in manufacturing engineering from Boston University, doesn’t want to leave it to chance for those who follow her path. “I am passionate about solving the riddle of why more women and girls don’t go into STEM careers,” she says.

Julie joined Gotara to ask for advice on how to get her career back on track. She’s a STEM woman with 10+ years of experience and she was facing a dual-career dilemma that many STEM women face. Her partner landed a great job in another city and Julie quit a job she loved because she thought she’d land a new opportunity fairly quickly. But the pandemic hit and hiring freezes put a serious chill on those plans. Read about her story and how Gotara helped and why the experience inspired her to become a Gotara advisor.