Despite the uphill battle women have historically had making their way in the engineering world, many have broken through the barriers to help improve our world. Below are just ten worthy of your attention, there are many, many more. Please mention ones you consider impressive in the comments below.

The Explorers

Maggie Scholtz, a mechanical engineer, worked on the Mars Curiosity Rover, the robotic vehicle that will get samples from Mars and get them back to earth to analyze. Her contributions were impressive enough that they named the rover Maggie. Scholtz is also part of the Mars 202 mission team.

Gwynne Shotwell is COO and the “president of SpaceX, the company that plans to bring people to Mars — the path to becoming one of the most powerful and influential women in business began when she met a woman who defied her expectations of what an engineer could be,” ShareAmerica noted.

Dr Gladys West has been working in the engineering world since the 1950s. Her work includes a satellite data system that helped guide military aircraft and missiles. She was inducted into the US Air Force Hall of Fame in 2018.

Sylvia Acevedo has a Master’s degree in industrial engineering from Stanford and worked with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Labs, as well as Dell and IBM. She is currently the CEO of the Girl Scouts and has added a series of badges in robotics, coding, engineering, and cybersecurity.

Modern Tech Leaders

Justyna Zander has been working on the tech for self-driving cars for over 10 years. She is a senior product manager at NVIDIA building the underlying technologies for self-driving cars. Zander has 6 patents and won the Society of Women Engineers Emerging Leaders Award in 2017. 

You can ask Siri who this next engineer is - Yael Garten helped develop the technology. Garten is the Siri Director of Data Science and Engineering at Apple. “Garten is in charge of using data to drive the decision-making for Apple's voice assistant, Siri. Using data, Garten's team helps decide how Siri is updated or what new features the program will get,” Business Insider notes.

Meredith Westafer is an industrial engineer who works at Tesla designing an automated material delivery system for the manufacturing of the lithium-ion batteries that uses a fleet of autonomous mobile robots to deliver goods to and from the production line.

Dr. Krysta M. Svores works for Microsoft as the General Manager of Quantum Software heading the Quantum Architectures and Computation group. Svores works at the leading edge of computer science, engineering, mathematics, and physics, with a focus on developing and implementing the next generation of computing- Quantum Computing, bringing with it the ability to solve some of the world’s most challenging problems, like food production and global warming. She has also worked with DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency).

Ayanna Howard is the founder of Zyrobotics, a technology education platform providing STEM education to children around the globe. Howard has been a professor of robotics and engineering at Georgia Institute ofTechnology for 15 years. She works developing intelligent machines that learn from humans and the environment.

Caitlin Kalinowski is interim head of hardware at Oculus, the division in charge of Facebook's virtual reality headset, the Oculus Rift. She has led the team that designed, not only the Oculus Rift, but also the Touch and Gear VR. Facebook tasks her with solving pressing engineering and design challenges, like fitting a massive amount of technology into a small headset.

Obviously, there are many more women engineers leading major companies and working on cutting-edge new technology. If you have some suggestions please add them in the comments so we can further recognize the impact of women in engineering, as we approach the International Women in Engineering Day on June 23rd.