As a youngster growing up under a communist dictatorship in Poland, Ewa Bauer's aspiration to be an engineer was inspired in part by her architect father, who fought the Nazis after they invaded Poland in 1939, then survived as a prisoner of war under Joseph Stalin.
"My father encouraged us to do what we wanted and not to think about what is good for boys or girls," she recollected during a recent tour of the Golden Gate Bridge seismic retrofit work, a multi-phased project now two years from completion. "He also taught me and my sister that we have to be kind to other people, to understand them. That man always carried a feeling of empathy in him."