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Behind the new Ford Explorer SUV being made at Chicago's South Side assembly plant are four female engineers who played key roles in designing the vehicle's controls and keeping its production on schedule.

Two of the women, Jennifer Brace and Brigitte Richardson, designed MyFord Touch, the system that lets drivers use voice-recognition technology to "talk" to the SUV and to set up their favorite way of receiving GPS route instructions.

Brace, a user interface engineer in Ford's Human-Machine Interface Group, said she made sure that the buttons on the touchscreens accommodate the touch of a woman's fingernails.

"We want MyFord Touch to be simple and intuitive for everyone, as well as take into account the different ways men and women might interact with it," she said.

The Explorer has two full-color, 4.2-inch LCD screens in front of the driver. The left-hand screen displays vehicle and driver information, while the right-hand screen shows GPS directions, incoming phone calls and the name of the song playing on the CD or iPod.

The driver sets up each screen as he or she wants. Brace prefers to see the distance her SUV must travel before it's empty, while another driver might prefer a digital fuel gauge display.

On the right-hand screen, the driver can set up visuals of GPS instructions, such as a right-turn arrow, the name of the street on which she is turning, and the distance to that street. A mom with kids might prefer to see the most fuel-efficient route to her destination, or ask the SUV to find the nearest ice-cream parlor and watch the directions pop up.

Brace, 29, who grew up in the Detroit area helping her dad build classic street rods, discovered in college that she wanted to work on improving the interaction between cars and their drivers.

"If you change the touchscreen or the sound that the door makes when you keep it open, people will notice," she said.

Richardson, lead engineer for the Explorer's voice-control technology and speech systems, credits her roots in Canada's Motor City -- Windsor, Ontario -- for sparking her interest in the auto industry.

Richardson's father and uncles, and her husband's father and grandfathers worked at Ford. After she earned her electrical engineering bachelor's degree, she felt the auto industry pull at her heartstrings. She tested engines and then moved to product development to work on the DVD's introduction to autos. The next technological step was voice recognition.

Drivers of the new Explorer can give vocal commands for the SUV to "find Starbucks," or "find parking" or, Richardson's favorite, "find a shoe store," and the vehicle's navigation technology does just that.

"I'm proud of the fact that it lets people have an easier time doing all of the things they want in the car, and it makes driving safer," said Richardson, the 34-year-old mom of a 19-month-old daughter.

Two other women who share the Explorer program manager's job are responsible for making sure the Explorer's parts and systems are lined up in the most efficient way at the Chicago assembly plant.

Though female engineers are widely scattered among small, medium and large private companies, these women -- who are based at Ford Motor Co. headquarters in Dearborn, Mich. -- represent the 12.2 percent who work for companies with 25,000 or more employees, according to the National Science Foundation's 2006 Scientists and Engineers Statistical Data System surveys, the latest available.

Julie Levine and Julie Rocco, commonly called the two Julies, work alternate days except for Wednesdays, when they tag-team their job.

In preparing for the Explorer's introduction at the Ford plant, the two women met many times a week to pore over a matrix with 1,400 items covering 13 pages, trying to figure out solutions for each issue.

One of their solutions calls for the Torrence Avenue plant to line up the Explorer's parts in sequence at a nearby warehouse and have them delivered just in time for assembly.

"We can't do that with every part, so we trade off where we can fit supplies inside the plant," Levine said.

Levine, a 40-year-old mother of a 7-year-old son and a 4-year-old daughter, drives 50 miles each way to work, so she is looking forward to driving a new Explorer with high-tech safety features and improved fuel economy.

"We need the three rows of seats," she said. "We like to buy large Christmas trees that we take home on the roof during the holidays. But I didn't want to drive an ostentacious gas guzzler. I call the new Explorer a 'smart' SUV, not just a sport SUV."

Said Rocco, a 39-year-old mother of a 3-year-old son, "From the beginning of the Explorer program, we said, 'We're going to reinvent an American icon.' "

Rocco said her favorite part of the process is taking a big idea from the planning stage through market research through design and sculpting, and then through digital and clay-model prototyping and building.

"We see the whole phase of product development," said Rocco, who is the only person in her family who works in the auto industry. Rocco caught the physics bug from her dad, a high school physics teacher, but decided on engineering when she was in college.

Levine's experience was the opposite: Her father, husband, two brothers, sister and brother-in-law work for Ford. Though Levine helped her dad, a Ford engineering manager, tinker on his boat and around the house, she credits her mom with insisting that she and her sister become engineers so they could be financially independent adults.

The two Julies describe their job-sharing arrangement like a marriage, and credit it with providing them the type of work-life balance that allows them to be involved in their children's activities.

"We trust each other completely and work toward the same goal," Rocco said. "That's what makes it successful."