The percentage of women in the semiconductor industry is stubbornly low. According to a report released in April, 51 percent of companies report 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 are expected, says Andrea Mohamed, COO and co-founder of QuantumBloom, 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.
IEEE Spectrum spoke to Mohamed about supporting women in semiconductor jobs, and why a retreat from these initiatives is at odds with the needs of the industry.
Andrea Mohamed on:
Tell me about your perspective as a returning veteran of the semiconductor industry.
Andrea Mohamed: I worked for a semiconductor startup company over 20 years ago, and it was very male dominated. Now, it’s still very male dominated. Seeing the semiconductor industry with fresh eyes, what I see is an industry that hasn’t evolved as quickly as other STEM-intensive industries. I’ve worked for science and research-oriented organizations, and the progress that’s been made in other sectors just hasn’t been made in this particular sector.
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Mohamed: On a macro scale, you have an industry that is facing a lot of geopolitical and economic forces that are disrupting the whole supply chain ecosystem around semiconductors, and there’s a push to reshore and onshore. There are a lot of infrastructure gaps in doing that, one of them being the workforce component. It’s not just semiconductors that are poised to be reshored and onshored to the United States, it’s also pharmaceuticals and automotive. And all of that is going to continue to put pressure on the supply and demand curve, if you will, around labor.
There’s been an enormous amount of attention on the STEM education pipeline, and rightfully so. China and India are producing STEM graduates at a rate that we are not keeping pace with. While we’ve had that focus on the STEM education 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. 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.
It sounds like the problem goes beyond the “leaky pipeline” that’s often discussed.
Mohamed: Right. We keep talking about the leaky pipeline for all these stages of women dropping out. It starts in middle school, when girls’ interest and confidence in STEM start to wane. At every stage there’s a leak. And then you get to this early career stage, which QuantumBloom is focused on, and that bucket is gushing. We’re losing a ton, and we’re all thinking about just putting more water in the bucket, when really, we need to fix the holes. There’s a lot of discussion about what it’s going to take to attract women, people of color, other communities into the semiconductor workforce, and very little on fixing the holes.
Oftentimes the early career experience is pretty much sink or swim for everybody, regardless of gender. We know with women, it’s more likely that they leave.
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I understand that the semiconductor industry may actually be regressing in these areas. Can you talk about that?
Mohamed: The latest report that came out from Global Semiconductor Alliance and Accenture on the state of women and semiconductors, to me, is like a canary in a coal mine. We’re seeing a decrease in public commitments for diversity and the progress that we’ve made around programs that support women. It’s counterintuitive that we are decreasing support at exactly the time we need to be attracting this audience into the industry.
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 the industry should work on these initiatives to build better workplaces, regardless of whether they’re labeled as promoting diversity?
Mohamed: I think a lot of DEI activity was performative. A lot of companies were really not committed to creating great workplaces for everybody. I think that’s part of the reason DEI has gotten politicized. There’s this notion that people were given opportunities that weren’t based on merit. What I’m saying is that this is not a merit conversation, right? Women are graduating with bachelor’s degrees at a rate higher than men and increasing. Really, this is about human capital development. You have women who are opting out of your industry, and you have to recognize and pay attention to the unique lived experience of women in these environments in order to solve the problem.
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.
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What have you observed in other industries, and what can semiconductor leaders learn from them?
Mohamed: Many women whose roots are in engineering end up working potentially in a technical organization, but not in a technical role. You see them also pivot into completely different industries. They go to business school, they become a consultant, they go to law school.
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.
Andrea Mohamed is COO and co-founder of QuantumBloom, a professional development company focused on women in STEM.Andrea Mohamed
When I think about employer-led solutions around early career talent, what comes to mind are apprenticeships, rotational programs, and leadership skill development—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.
Are there other steps that you think are important for semiconductor leaders to take?
Mohamed: The things that QuantumBloom solves are very early career and focused on individuals. At the same time, companies need to be thinking about top-down culture change and industry transformation. Those are longer term horizon things to fix.
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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