Women with engineering degrees made historic breakthroughs at City Hall, JEA and JTA

Margaret Limbaugh was a mother of two young children when she decided to set her sights on earning an engineering degree from the University of North Florida.

"My ex-husband said, 'Oh, so you made an 'A' in elementary algebra and you think you're going to be an engineer,'" Limbaugh recalled. "And I went, 'Watch me.'"

While Limbaugh was going after a UNF degree that would land her a job at JEA, Nina Sickler and Greer Johnson Gillis were starting their careers in engineering after graduating from Georgia Tech. Sickler, the daughter of immigrants, picked engineering knowing her family would like to see her in that field or medicine. Gillis had started college thinking she'd become a nurse like many of her relatives but then shifted gears to engineering.

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They didn't know each other at Georgia Tech, but years later, their paths would cross in Jacksonville where Sickler is the first woman to serve as the city's public works director (Mayor Donna Deegan jokingly referred to her as "Public Works Barbie" in announcing her appointment while the "Barbie" movie about female empowerment and ambition was packing movie theaters). Gillis is the first woman to oversee the engineering division at the Jacksonville Transportation Authority.

Limbaugh carved her own first at JEA. She is the first woman to be director of one of the utility's power stations.

Higher up JEA's chain of command, Vickie Cavey became the first female engineer to serve as CEO when the board named her the interim CEO on April 15. Cavey earned a University of Florida degree in mechanical engineering before joining JEA in 1984.

JEA Chief Operating Officer Raynetta Curry Marshall earned a bachelor's degree in civil engineering and a master's degree in environmental engineering, both from Howard University, before she embarked on a career in the utility industry.

Kim Wheeler, who earned a UF bachelor's degree in electrical engineering before joining JEA in 1990, was promoted in early April to vice president of operations support, reporting to Marshall.

At the Jacksonville Port Authority, Kelsey Cox is the first woman to serve as senior director of engineering and construction for JaxPort. Cox earned a bachelor's degree in civil engineering from Florida State University and was a project manager for the city's public works department before joining JaxPort in 2022.

Men still greatly outnumber women in the engineering field, but as more women choose engineering for their degrees, the rise of female engineers to top leadership positions in Jacksonville shows how the profession is gradually changing.

That kind of career advancement can help convince women who have the skills to be engineers that they can select it as their major in college, said Hemani Kaushal, an assistant professor in electrical engineering at UNF.

"When they see women are at higher positions in a leadership role, that sets a role model for future generations," Kaushal said. "They see this field definitely belongs to them."

At UNF, 371 women earned bachelor of science degrees in civil, electrical and mechanical engineering since the school awarded its first engineering degree in the 1992-93 academic year through the 2022-23 academic year, which is about 15% of all engineering degrees awarded over the time frame.

In the 2022-23 academic year, 27 women earned bachelor's degrees in engineering, or nearly 20% of graduates.

"We can see that the glass isn't half full, but it is filling up," Kaushal said.

Women earn a higher proportion of master's degrees than bachelor's degrees. UNF awarded 36 master's degrees in civil, electrical and mechanical engineering to women since the first graduate degree in the 2009-10 academic year, or about 22% of those degrees. In spring 2023, the first graduates of the school's Master of Science in Material Science and Engineering program were two women.

Sickler: Immigrant family roots encouraged math and science

Limbaugh, Sickler and Gillis followed different paths to their current roles, but they have in common that they earned their engineering degrees in the 1990s when even fewer women were in engineering than today.

Limbaugh got her bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from UNF in 1997. Gillis graduated with a bachelor's degree in civil engineering in 1991 and then a master's degree in civil engineering with a concentration in transportation in 1993 from Georgia Tech.

Sickler graduated with a bachelor's degree in civil engineering from Georgia Tech in 1991 and then studied two years in the school's graduate program for civil/structural engineering.

She said she enjoyed science and math so becoming an engineer was a practical way of applying what she loved to do. Her father had come to the United States with a goal of completing his doctorate in chemistry at the University of Florida. He didn't finish the degree and instead joined some of his friends from college in starting restaurants.

"They used to joke he was using his chemistry degree to understand the chemistry of food," she said.

The family moved to Ocala where the local newspaper ran a photo of her father working with her on a middle school science fair project. The science fair projects kept coming in high school where she was a varsity cheerleader and class valedictorian.

She said she's often asked whether she worked in the family restaurant because that's typical for children in immigrant families, but her parents wanted their children to put their time into school because they didn't envision them being in the restaurant business. They did pass onto her a desire to be a business owner.

"My choice was civil engineering because my parents had been entrepreneurs and civil engineering seemed like the most likely way I could go into business for myself," she said.

After moving to Jacksonville and working for other firms, she founded Landmark Engineering in 2006. The start-up originated in a friend's office that she's described as being so cramped she could touch the walls on both sides of the office while sitting in her chair.

She sold her firm in 2017 to Pond and Company and lead Pond's operations in Florida through 2023. Deegan appointed her as public works director in September where she's in charge of the department that takes projects from design to construction for streets, parks, drainage and civic buildings across the city.

She said she didn't know in advance that Deegan would refer to her as "Public Works Barbie" during the announcement of her appointment. Sickler hadn't even seen the movie at the time, but after watching the film, she said she appreciated it.

"I loved it," she said. "Now I have a story for the rest of my career."

Limbaugh: A journey from waitress to electrical engineer

While Sickler knew coming out of high school she wanted to be an engineer, Limbaugh started a family and was in the working world before she pursued that career.

"I was bartending, waitressing, doing whatever I needed to do," she said. "And I thought, you know, this is not going to work because there's no insurance. I'm going to walk my legs off. I'm young now and it's fun to do and I'm good at it, but one day I'm going to be older and I'm not going to be wanting to do this. So I made up my mind to go back to school."

She was divorced at the time with two young children. She grew up in Atlantic Beach and didn't want to move her children to another city for college, so over six years, she went to Florida State College at Jacksonville and then UNF. The only degree offered at that time by UNF's engineering school was in electrical engineering.

"So I said, 'OK, I'm going to be an electrical engineer," she said.

She said she really liked math and for a while, she could "cook, have the kids hanging on me and do my homework all at one time." But as she moved to more advanced courses, it became harder to handle the school load.

"There were days when it was just so much that you know, you really felt like sitting in the corner crying," she said.

She said she would focus on what needed to be done that day and tomorrow "and that would just put everything into perspective." She said she takes the same approach to managing complex projects at JEA.

"I got the engineering degree, but just going through all of that was valuable," she said.

She joined JEA straight out of college. Even though she's worked at the same employer for her entire career, she said the variety of job assignments has kept the job interesting. She was a project manager who took on a variety of construction projects across the JEA system until becoming director of energy production at the Northside Generating Station in August 2022.

"It's really been exciting because with the electrical engineering degree, depending what you do with that, you can kind of get locked into sitting behind a desk, and that would have gotten old," she said. "This has been the perfect fit."

Gillis: An engineer from a family of nurses

Gillis went to college intending to become a nurse, which would have been a page from her family's playbook.

"All of my aunts were nurses so I wanted to follow in their footsteps," she said.

But she said after a semester, her interest turned to engineering because she really enjoyed the math and science courses. A physics teacher encouraged her to pursue that academic path.

"And I'm so glad I followed my heart and did it," she said.

She switched her course work from nursing at Armstrong State University in Savannah, her hometown, and then transferred to Georgia Tech. She sometimes found herself as the only woman and the only person of color in the classroom. She credits Georgia Tech for creating an academic culture where all students were striving to be solid engineers who would support the community.

"So it made it easier when I got into the working world and I was the only woman in the room or the only woman of color in the room: 'Hey, I'm an engineer just like the rest of you. Let's make this happen,'" Gillis said.

Gillis worked for private firms and for the District of Columbia Government before joining JTA in 2020. JTA, which also operates the bus system, has a history of road-building. Gillis, who is senior vice president and chief infrastructure and development officer, is in charge of the agency's work on constructing the Emerald Trail network and also the Ultimate Urban Circulator using automated vehicles in downtown.

She has been active in promoting diversity in the transportation field. President Barack Obama honored her as a White House Champion of Change in the engineering industry. The Conference of Minority Transportation Officials gave its highest award to her in 2022 for her leadership..

She said she and Sickler have talked about their time at Georgia Tech and how they likely crossed paths at the school, but they don't remember each other as college students. Now they are jointly responsible for hundreds of millions of dollars in projects at City Hall and at JTA.

Gillis said she sees more women gravitating toward science, technology, engineering and math in college, and she wants that to carry over to career advancement as well.

"Which is why I'm very excited that Nina Sickler is in the role she has as director of public works," Gillis said. "Think about it: 2023 is the first time we have a woman in that role. So when I see women who go through the engineering program at colleges, get into their careers and then move up to leadership, that's what excites me and that's what I want to see more of."

This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: Women engineers fill top Jacksonville, Florida leadership jobs