First Posted: 2/3/2015
LIMA — Failure isn’t an option to Marcelyn Boone.
Now plant manager at INEOS in Lima, Boone credits her success partly to the way she was raised. Her parents taught her and her siblings to never accept failure as an option, she said.
She grew up on a farm in Texas with her twin sister and older brother.
“There was a work ethic there that was taught to us by our parents,” said Boone, who’s been with INEOS for a few years.
That work ethic carried her through a long career in engineering, which, early on, wasn’t very friendly to women.
“I didn’t recognize some of (the sexism),” Boone said, referring to what she experienced in her early years on the job at different companies in Texas. “(They) probably put me in that job so I would fail.”
But failure was never an option for Boone.
“If you continue to succeed, to do the job … and you’re positive about it — ultimately that will be recognized,” she said.
Throughout her early jobs in engineering, Boone often faced sexism and discrimination. Men asked here “what in the (expletives) do you want to take a man’s job for?” Other men told people they thought she would do better as a nurse or a teacher instead of an engineer.
One man stole her work once and passed it off as her own. Still others told her she wasn’t cut out for the job and passed her over for promotions because of her gender.
She even faced discrimination from her peers, who were her friends to her face but gave her all the extra, “dog” jobs no one wanted. One even admitted to her later that he had tried to make things harder on her.
Despite all of that, she’s the first female plant manager at the INEOS facility in Lima, and she was the first female department head in one of her jobs in Texas.
“I think women have come a long way,” she said. “I think there are great opportunities.”
The challenges she’s faced have made her who she is today.
“Look at what it is you do in life,” she said. “To me it was almost like a mission. My calling in life is to be a manager and help people.”
