Kellie Doucette, the state’s chief operating officer and a trailblazer for women in the workforce, was quick to give praise to the more than 100 women at a luncheon honoring women in manufacturing Thursday, telling them their leadership and mentorship is having an impact in the work world of today and tomorrow.
“That’s how female leadership multiplies,” Doucette said. “That’s how opportunity grows, and that’s how an industry changes.”
Doucette, New Jersey’s first-ever chief operating officer under Gov. Mikie Sherrill, pointed to her own career as proof — she was handed responsibility, she said, before she felt ready for it, first as a campaign volunteer, later as a senior official in an administration led by a woman.
She guessed many who filled the room at the Trenton Country Club had similar tales.
“Someone trusted you with a responsibility before you were sure you were ready,” she said. “Someone encouraged you to apply for the job, take the promotion, start the company, lead the team, or maybe even just speak up in that meeting.”
But for all the success women are having in the manufacturing workplace — nearly 1 in 3 employees nationwide is female, and it’s no longer unusual to see women as bosses or founders — many challenges remain.
That always was a theme throughout the event, created and run by the N.J. Manufacturing Extension Program.
Women cannot be satisfied with their advancement; they must celebrate it to ensure it becomes more ingrained. And they must publicly acknowledge when they are treated unfairly or unjustly.
Cari August of Somerset-based Lightera, the 2025 Rising Star at the event, brought that point home in some of the most gripping comments of the day.
August told the crowd that being a woman never slowed her from excelling — but it did not prevent her from facing gender-biased treatment and unwanted harassment in the workplace while doing so:
- A guidance counselor steered her toward colleges based on favorable male-to-female ratios;
- Lab mates sent her to the machine shop because the men there “appreciated my assets”;
- A professor propositioned her when she was 20.
August told the group she shrugged them off at the time but that she is bringing them up now in hope of creating a workplace where future women don’t have to walk in those footsteps.
“Maybe all those incidents taken individually didn’t matter,” August said. “But I kept thinking, what about all the other women experiencing this type of harassment? Could the experiences I had turn someone away from a career in a male-dominated industry? I had to concede: yes.”
It’s that recognition — that individual resilience isn’t the same as a fixed problem — that August said is the real value of programs like Rising Star.
“NJMEP can’t fix this alone,” she said. “But they can provide and sustain these amazing platforms that shift the spotlight to the excellence that diversity brings to the manufacturing industry.”
Assemblywoman Verlina Reynolds-Jackson (D-Trenton) said everything builds.
She told the crowd to imagine a young girl touring a manufacturing facility and then, at the end, learning that a woman was the founder and the boss.
“She doesn’t have to decide (between being a leader and an owner),” she said. “She gets to be both.”
Doucette said the reason such scenarios are possible today is because of the women in the room.
But she stressed efforts to get there have to continue. And be celebrated.
Doucette said women now help lead the state’s work on affordability, economic development, workforce policy, energy, education and public safety. And that it’s not unusual to find more women than men in a meeting in the front office.
Doucette said the women in room Thursday in Trenton deserve the same.
Remember, she said: “You belong here.”
