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Arthur T Knackerbracket [soylentnews.org] writes:

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story [ieee.org]:

The percentage of women in the semiconductor industry [ieee.org] is stubbornly low. According to a report released in April, 51 percent of companies report [accenture.com] having less than 20 percent of their technical roles filled by women. At the same time, fewer of these companies were publicly committed to equal opportunity measures in 2024 than the year prior, the same report found.

This lack of support comes at the same time that major workforce shortages [ieee.org] are expected, says Andrea Mohamed [linkedin.com], COO and co-founder of QuantumBloom [quantumbloom.com], which helps companies attract, retain, and advance early career women in STEM. The company focuses on the transition from higher education to the workforce, a critical point during which many women leave STEM.

There's been an enormous amount of attention on the STEM education [ieee.org] pipeline, and rightfully so. China [ieee.org] and India [ieee.org] are producing STEM graduates at a rate that we are not keeping pace with. While we've had that focus on the STEM education [ieee.org] pipeline, there's been very little focused attention on what industry is doing inside companies to address the workforce challenges.

There is a lot of additional concern around corporate cultures, burn-and-churn cyclical nature, policies that seem out of date relative to other industries, including as it relates to child care. Industry is very clearly articulating to education what it needs the next generation to have from a skills perspective [ieee.org]. But we don't see the voice of the next generation worker influencing how industry is attracting them. We've got to start to see the industry recognize how it's in its own way when it comes to workforce development.

I understand the pressures that companies are facing around anything that's related to DEI. We need to change the conversation from DEI to talent management. This is retention and avoiding turnover costs. This is about needing every available brilliant mind in the United States that wants to be in semiconductors. We have offshored this industry for so long. Other countries have existing talent bases. We have to build it.

So there are semantics in all of this, but it's not just relabeling. This is about business. You are not going to be able to compete on a global stage in the United States if you are not finding ways to attract and retain new communities of workers, and women are one of those communities. That means understanding what women need from their employer, because if you do not provide it, they will go somewhere else that does. The concern by companies about, if they run a program like QuantumBloom, does that create a risk? It's the wrong question about risk. Your big risk is that your fab is empty, because you can't find workers and retain them.

In other industries, there are organizations that are very intentional about attracting and retaining their youngest talent. They are dedicating resources to investing in them, which is very rare - most organizations invest more the higher up you go. Really, we need to be thinking about flipping that script and investing more sooner.

When I think about employer-led solutions around early career talent, what comes to mind are apprenticeships, rotational programs, and leadership skill development [ieee.org] - all the things you're not taught in school, but that are really important to your success. These are skills that you take with you for an entire career. When you invest in the top, most of the time people say, "I wish I had this in my 20s" I don't see many of these solutions being used in this industry. I heard recently one of the big semiconductor giants in this country used to have an engineering rotational program and stopped it five years ago. I was talking to a person who had been in that program and how pivotal it was in their early career experience.

People join companies and quit bosses. The relationship with your boss is so important. You can be in a relatively terrible organization culturally and have a wonderful boss, and you can have career success. Vice versa, you could be in an awesome corporate culture with a terrible boss and not thrive. If we can improve that primary work relationship, build more empathy for each other's experiences at a local level, we can improve work outcomes and retention. And then things start to spread. That manager who may be supporting a particular woman in our program, they learn skills and tools to be more inclusive leaders that extends beyond just that woman.

We're doing that more at that local level, but man, companies really need to be addressing top-down transformation and culture change. At the end of the day, we need semiconductor leaders to envision becoming a magnet for all talent, and then commit the resources and organizational changes needed to make that vision reality.

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