I wanted to fly fighters because those pilots were the cream of the crop,” she says. “I thought to myself, Well, it takes about two years to get thro… - Carey Lohrenz

When you hear these little comments, whether it's about your fingernail polish or your hair or what you're wearing at the time, it can feel like the slow drop of Chinese water torture, Lohrenz recalls. When you're there to fly this magnificent fighter jet, it chips away at you.

People think that fighter pilots aren’t afraid of anything, and yet that’s not true,” she says. “It’s that we’ve learned and developed the ability to work through fear, and flip it, and make it actionable, so that it works for us, and not against us.”

So, knowing that history and understanding that every day I showed up, I was standing on the shoulders of greatness, she says. Calm is your superpower, but the relentless scrutiny simply because I was a woman, that was nonstop.