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For Paige, however, logic and practicality won out. "I figured, if you're worried about the military and the people who run it, then we ought to make sure it has the right kind of people," she says. She applied for the Navy's officer candidate school.

Paige in her Arlington, Va., office with executive assistant Ann Spurio.

Her term of commitment kept on multiplying by twos, and by 1976, she'd earned a master of science degree from the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif. Five years later, she was designated an engineering duty officer. In engineering, she'd discovered, she could compete with men on an equal footing.

"At the time, there were not many women in that technical field," says retired Rear Admiral Tim Hood, now a vice president at Lockheed. "She was so bright, we tried to help her along. Not that she got where she is because she was a woman, but it didn't hurt. She could carry the technical message and the equal opportunity message."

Paige herself considers her gender a non-issue. Whatever sexism she's had to confront has been overcome, she says, simply by doing her job well. The Missile Defense Agency is "inherently chauvinistic," says retired Rear Admiral George R. Meinig Jr. "It's hard for women officers. But when Kate was designated technical director of ballistic missile defense, she immediately established her credentials. She was a pillar of competence."

Kate Koehler Paige '70 and her horse Brick jump a hurdle in the mid-'70s in California.

Both Hood and Meinig helped Paige plot a long-term career path by arranging tours of duty to round out her technical and leadership skills. On her way up the military ladder, she watched some women fall by the wayside, not necessarily because they were intimidated but because they weren't cut out for the rigors of military life. At officers' school, her roommate, a quiet, retiring young woman, even attempted suicide.

"There was a senior petty officer who worked for me early on who neither liked nor respected women," Paige recalls. "But he loved and respected the Navy. So the fact that I wore an officer's uniform trumped it."

Paige credits the discipline of horse-riding for her inner calm. She continues to ride whenever she can. The plodders still don't interest her. One Sunday, the mare Paige was riding took a jump badly and fell. Paige was thrown, and hit her head. A few days later, she boarded a plane for London, proudly sporting a big, black eye.

Lisa Prevost '84, a freelance writer, is a regular contributor to the New York Times, Boston Globe and More magazine.

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