'I was shocked. I didn’t think it could be true': Here's how this Plano exec would get more women in STEM fields

Growing up, Sherrie Clark considered Sally Ride an idol.

Ride was an astronaut for NASA and the first U.S. woman in space. Clark, who grew up in the rural farming town of Schuyler, Nebraska, decided she would follow in her idol’s footsteps and become an astronaut. And she thought the best path to achieving that goal was to become an engineer.

“You spend a lot of time on the farm looking at the sky because the stars are just beautiful in the rural environments,” said Clark, now the chief technology officer of GE Critical Power in Plano. “So, I thought, ‘This would be really cool to go up there and visit.’”

Somewhere along the way, Clark’s interest in space waned but her passion for engineering persisted. Her father was an engineer so she had the support of her family. 

Nobody ever told Clark that engineering was a male-dominated field until May of her senior year of high school. She was on a campus tour at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln when someone told her about the ratio of men to women in the field.

“I was shocked. I didn’t think it could be true,” Clark said. “I graduated the university with three women in my electrical engineering class. Even to this day, we don’t graduate enough women through electrical engineering. We’re doing better in a lot of the engineering fields, but electrical engineering is one that we definitely don’t graduate enough women.”

After Clark graduated Nebraska with her 3.98 GPA (she got a B+ in Quantum Physics), she eventually found her way to GE (NYSE: GE) where she’s worked in several different roles. 

Originally, she wanted to do the engineering work. She wanted to spend time in the lab and solve problems that way.

That didn’t last long, as the company identified Clark as a leader early on in her career. 

After a couple of years, Clark was put in charge of her own team of engineers. And after years of doing that, Clark faced a new challenge. 

Previously, Clark had been an expert in whatever task the engineering team was working on. Her new challenge was to figure out how to lead a team of engineers with 35 years of experience.

“At some point, you have to make the step of, how do you lead people that don’t know how to do their jobs?” Clark said. “I may not know all the different technologies, but there’s a lot of one technology that’s similar to another. And so, how do I still drive my team and ask the right questions and understand what’s going on, even though they’re the experts? It’s just a skill that you work through and develop over time.”

One of Clark’s main focuses now is getting more women in the fields of science, technology, engineering and math, or STEM. Clark understands that her position at one of the largest companies in the world impacts young women coming up in the industry.

That’s why she tries to mentor women in her field. She also started a blog last year, Courage to Be Seen, where she writes on things like self confidence and stepping out of your comfort zone. 

To talk further about her career path and getting more women into STEM fields, Clark sat down with the Dallas Business Journal:

Growing up in a small town, did you feel like you needed to get out?

I don’t know if I had a feeling that I had to get out. But there was never anything to keep me in a small town in terms of jobs. I always planned to go to school and go to university and get a degree. And because there’s no industry in the town where I came, there was nothing there to keep me, rather than ‘I had to get out.’

Is there any part of you that wished you had stayed doing the engineering rather than taking a leadership position?

Not really. After a while I guess you just need a new challenge. What I love about my current role is I look at it really with having three big core pieces. One third of it is technical. Even though I’m not designing our products today, I still get to work alongside my team that’s designing them.

What would you do to get more women into electrical engineering?

I think we need to work on a few things in parallel because I don’t think we can work on only one thing. I do think we need to work on getting more girls interested in STEM. That means middle school, high school. We need to work on middle school girls, high school girls, we have to get more girls studying in college. And then, as we do get them into industry, we have to do more to keep them. We need to get more mentors, so that way the females that we do have know that they can be successful. As I travel around the world, the No. 1 question I get — no matter where I go, no matter what country I’m in — from other women is, ‘How do you do it?’ ... I have two boys. They’re 17 and 14. It’s been a challenge to raise a family and have a busy career, but not impossible. 

Does that question bother you? Because I assume you wouldn’t get that question if you were a man. 

I don’t know if it bothers me so much, but it does show the value of being a mentor to others, so that they know that they’re not alone.

About Sherrie Clark

About the company

Sherrie Clark was selected as a 2018 Women in Technology Awards honoree.