November 20, 2025 • 47 mins
Want a candid look at how women build durable careers in one of the world’s toughest industries? We sit down with three semiconductor leaders - Nitza Basoco, Anne Meixner and Julia Freer - who share how early encouragement, gritty problem solving, and clear communication turned curiosity into impact. From summer jobs at national labs and early days at IBM to leading operations, test, and sustainability initiatives, their stories show why diverse voices aren’t just nice to have—they’re a competitive advantage.
We dig into the real moments: being the only woman in a test engineering group, pushing for inclusive language that actually changes culture, and navigating career pivots to balance family, flexibility, and ambition. You’ll hear how mentorship and sponsorship differ—and why you need both—plus specific tactics to make them work inside fast-moving chip companies. One unforgettable segment starts with a five-minute crash-and-burn presentation and becomes a two-year, teamwide communication overhaul that turns shy engineers into confident presenters ready for conferences and boardrooms.
Across materials science, advanced packaging, test and inspection, and sustainability, the thread is clear: communication is a core engineering skill. Writing reflective status reports, designing slides for decisions, and telling a tight technical story can accelerate yield improvements, align manufacturing and supply chain, and win executive support. We also tackle today’s DEI headwinds with a practical lens—keep the pipeline alive, promote from within, and build programs that outlast policy shifts. The conversation closes with why their new book matters: ordinary, relatable role models who show many valid paths into STEM and semiconductors.
Learn more about the book, Empowering Women in STEM.
Teradyne test solutions for semiconductors lets customers consistently meet their quality standards.
Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
This episode of the 3D InCites podcast is sponsored
by Teradyne.
As AI and cloud computing drivesemiconductor complexity,
Teradyne's test solutions forsemiconductors and electronics
lets customers consistently meettheir quality standards.
Its advanced collaborative andmobile robots support
manufacturing and warehouseoperations for companies of all
(00:21):
sizes.
With cutting-edge solutions fortoday's complex devices,
Teradyne is powering the pursuitof innovation.
Stay connected at Teradyne.com.
Speaker (00:39):
Hi there.
I'm Francoise von Trapp, andthis is the 3D Insights Podcast.
Speaker 1 (00:50):
Hi everyone.
This week we've got a specialepisode that brings awareness to
a topic that is near and dearto my heart, and that is how to
encourage young women to pursuecareers in STEM, which is rather
ironic for me, actually, as Inever set out to be a scientist
or a technologist, and I stillam not one, but here I am, a
woman in the semiconductorindustry.
(01:12):
So I think the only thing moreinspirational than reading
success stories is hearing aboutthem firsthand.
So today I'm talking with threewomen who intentionally set out
on a STEM career path.
They recently contributedchapters to a new book called
Empowering Women in STEM: Pioneering Paths to Shape the (01:27):
undefined
Future.
The book serves to remind usthat the future of STEM thrives
on diversity, innovation, andunique perspectives that women
bring to the table.
Contributors to the book hailedfrom a myriad of STEM
professions, from military andculinary to research, medicine,
and technology.
Now, as it happens, all ofthree of my guests today pursued
(01:50):
careers in the semiconductorindustry, and I'm looking
forward to hearing theirstories.
So welcome to the podcast.
Anne Meixner , Julia Freer,and Nisa Basoco.
Thanks.
Glad to be here.
I'm happy to be here.
Thanks for having us.
I'm super excited for thisconversation, but before we get
started, I always ask people tointroduce themselves.
Could you each just have alittle bit about yourself and
your current roles?
(02:10):
Ann, why don't you go first?
Sure.
Speaker 2 (02:12):
My name is Ann Meixner and I've worked in
the semiconductor industry forover 40 years.
I have two uh current paidgigs.
I am a freelance contributor touh semiconductor engineering
and online publication.
And I am the heterogeneousintegration roadmap fellow,
(02:33):
which is I get to support anall-volunteer effort to uh
create a technology roadmap foradvanced packaging solutions and
in various applications.
So that's exciting.
Speaker 1 (02:45):
Oh, that's excellent.
And Nitsa, how about you?
Speaker 4 (02:49):
Um I've been in the semiconductor industry for about
a quarter of a century.
I'm I'm dating myself.
I started my career at Teradineas a factory applications
engineer.
And 20 some odd years later,I'm back at Teradine.
I started um two years ago astheir technology and market
strategist and have recentlytransitioned into their mobility
(03:10):
business unit manager.
So a little morebusiness-oriented type role.
Speaker 3 (03:14):
Okay, and Julia.
Hello, I am the founder ofMaterial Value Consulting, where
I work with manufacturingcompanies in several different
sectors, includingsemiconductors, to really help
them better tell their storiesaround both product excellence
and sustainability.
(03:35):
And speaking of that, I've beenwriting a sustainability
one-on-one column for 3DInsights since 2021.
And I'm also the author ofseveral books.
And before that, you were inindustry, correct?
Yes, I did start my career as aprocess development engineer in
semiconductor packaging.
(03:56):
And this audience actuallyknows what that is back in the
90s.
Speaker 1 (03:59):
And, by the way, Nita quarter of a century sounds a
lot longer than 25 years, butAnne's got you beat at 40 years.
That's more than a quarter of acentury.
When you're relatively a baby,this industry.
Speaker 2 (04:13):
I am in the 70s, I am a baby.
So that's a lot.
I I count my summer jobs.
You count your summer jobs.
Okay.
Well, because actually some ofthem were related to the
semiconductor industries.
Speaker 1 (04:24):
Does that have anything to do with the fact
that your parents were also inthe industry?
You talked about how youfollowed in your parents'
engineering footsteps in yourchapter of the book.
Speaker 2 (04:36):
My father was uh worked as an engineer at the
Naval Research Lab.
I grew up inside Washington,D.C.
And so when I was graduatingfrom high school, he said, here,
fill out this application.
So I had right out of highschool, you know, a summer job
that was then called theNational Bureau of Standards.
And then I went back a coupleof years later and worked in one
of the semiconductor divisionshelping some scient scientists
(04:59):
um build an elopsometer thatthey were creating for to create
standards and do umexperimental research there.
So I had a little taste foreven a summer job, right?
And ellipsometers apparently isstill used today in the
semiconductor industry.
Speaker 1 (05:16):
Well, there you go.
Yeah.
And so then was it a naturalprogression for you to study
engineering and go on to work atIBM?
Speaker 2 (05:25):
It was a natural choice because of having a
father who was an engineer andhaving a mother who said, you
know, don't get a degree inmath, get a degree in
engineering, you'll get paidmore.
Because I think that was herexperience to get a degree in
math and not engineering, butbecause she didn't have that
opportunity there.
That just seemed to be thenatural choice.
(05:45):
And because I took a break fromgoing to school, I took a job
at IBM and that hooked me intothe semiconductor industry
because I became fascinated bydefects.
unknown (05:57):
Okay.
Speaker 1 (05:58):
So that's a shared commonality of the three of you
that you all had support andencouragement from your families
to pursue degrees in STEM.
Um, do you think you would haveif you hadn't had that support?
Speaker 3 (06:13):
It's hard to know.
I mean, it's almost likesaying, if we'd been born into a
different family, what pathwould we have taken?
How could we know this?
Right.
I guess, I mean, having parentswho are scientists, I remember
early on, I don't know what,like in elementary school, we're
asked to think of possiblecareers.
And the two I thought of weremusician and chemist.
(06:35):
It just that's what occurred tome when I was nine years old or
what have you.
Because, like, okay, those arethings that people do in my
family.
Right.
Speaker 1 (06:43):
And you've done both of those things, sort of.
Sort of.
Sort of, not chemist, but Imean you've been a musician.
You are a musician.
Yes.
And you actually left theindustry for a little while to
focus on your music and thencame back.
And so, how about you?
You know, how did you end uppursuing that STEM path?
Speaker 4 (07:02):
Funny, um, you say whether or not I'd actually
pursue STEM.
I think, regardless of where Iwas at, I always loved math.
It's almost like math andnumbers were always following
me.
And they were in my brain, andI had to think about them, and
they they wanted to, they theywanted attention.
Um, but it was also acombination of my parents plus
(07:24):
uh my uh teachers when I wasgrowing up.
Recently I've been thinkingabout you know, my second grade
teacher, my fourth gradeteacher, and everybody else
along the way, and they werevery helpful in trying to see,
oh, okay, she knows all thisstuff.
What else could we teach her inmathematics?
And I was just naturallyinclined to it.
Uh, but my parents, especiallymy dad, like he would, you know,
(07:46):
we my mom and my dad actuallywould go to the grocery store
and they were like, okay, tallyeverything up.
If you're within a quarter withtax, then uh you would get a
candy.
And so I was all over it, youknow.
My brothers and sisters werealways trying.
So you also had to be first.
You couldn't just be, you know,you couldn't just be right, you
had to be first.
So it was that little bit ofcompetition there at the grocery
(08:09):
store for that little, youknow, caramels, because I love
caramels.
We also would do flashcards,right?
Um, subtraction,multiplication, uh, and whatnot.
And so there was a lot oflittle games that my parents
played with us uh throughout.
And they were my favorites,maybe not my sisters and my
brothers, but they were mine.
Uh so you know, math was alwaysthere.
I remember one day, you know,my dad was coming home from work
(08:31):
and he was late.
And though I loved math, I alsoloved reading.
So I was on the in the livingroom sofa reading a book.
I was like, where is he?
And he was a little late thereand he came in, uh, but he was
carrying all these like youknow, rolled up pieces of paper.
And I'm like, well, what'sthat?
Uh so curiosity, of course, gotthe better of me.
I put my book down and he'slike, Oh, well, I'm late because
(08:54):
we're trying to figure out thisproblem at work, and this
machine's not working quiteright.
And I was like, Well, whatseems to be the problem?
So got to the kitchen table,rolled out the schematics, and
he started just answering myquestions left and right.
And as a young kid, I'mthinking, oh, I'm helping my
dad, this is awesome.
And I and I, you know, and hewas great.
Just, you know, he answered allmy questions and my different
(09:17):
curiosities.
We went in roundabout circleseverywhere.
And the next day, he actuallycame home early and he was like,
Yes, we fixed the problem.
Uh ever since then, I've beenhooked, right?
I needed to solve problems andfigure out how to solve
problems.
And I found that the best wayto do it was through mathematics
first and then throughengineering.
(09:37):
So that's how I ended up.
Speaker 3 (09:38):
Yeah, Nietzsche, I think the bit in your chapter
where you talk about basicallydiscovering the concept of
infinity at the age of six, thatis rather unusual.
And I know I have a son who's amath genius, so I can imagine I
don't know that he exactly didthat, but me know maybe he
might, he might have alreadydiscovered it by that age.
So I think there's acombination of just natural
(10:02):
inclination and interest andbeing exposed to things.
Speaker 4 (10:06):
I was, we were going to my grandmother's house and I
was just staring out the window,had forgotten my book, which
met made me put it down.
So then I'm just looking at thepath and just imagining one
number being laid down afteranother after another, just like
bricks on the road.
Then I realized I was like,hmm, I can't think of the
biggest number.
Like, what's the biggest numberI have?
(10:26):
It's this number.
No, it's this number, no, it'sthis number.
I can always add one tosomething.
And I asked my parents, they'relike, yeah, there's a thing,
there's a concept calledinfinity.
I was like, what?
Uh and as a little kid, youdon't, you know, there's a lot
of terminology you don't know, alot of concepts you don't know.
But it was uh something thatstayed in my head for a very
long time of like, hmm, whatelse don't I know?
(10:48):
And should I be thinking anddaydreaming more than maybe
reading so much?
But uh you do a little bit ofboth these days.
Speaker 1 (10:56):
I think both are very, very important.
Um, I think reading is soimportant for developing
empathy.
Um but like fiction especially.
But it's funny because you allhad interests in science and you
all had encouragement from yourparents to pursue those
interests as women, as girls,which doesn't happen everywhere.
(11:18):
I went and gave a talk at theSociety of Women Engineers in
Salzburg, I don't know, six orseven years ago.
And one of the efforts therewas to encourage parents to
encourage their daughters and toget their daughters to study
STEM really required parentalsupport.
So it may feel to the three ofyou that yeah, it was just
(11:41):
natural, but you're veryfortunate because not everybody
would think that.
I didn't study STEM, had nointerest in studying STEM.
But at the time of when I wasthinking about college, there
weren't a lot of girls goinginto engineering and math.
And if they did, especiallymath, they were coming out and
teaching.
That's changed so much now.
(12:03):
Um, how have you experiencedbeing a woman in the industry?
What has it been like for eachof you?
Speaker 3 (12:11):
So it's interesting.
In my first job out of gradschool, there were actually a
lot of women at the company.
Um, the VP of the RD departmentwas a woman.
Um, it was also very young,like all the VPs, except for one
of them, were under 35.
(12:32):
So it was this sense of we werethe young people out there to
conquer something.
Anyway, but there were otherwomen around.
And another thing that when Iwas writing my chapter and I
thought back and I looked backat some of my notes from grad
school, my research group at UCBerkeley was about 50-50,
(12:54):
male-female.
And that was in the materialscience.
Speaker 1 (12:56):
Material science.
See, I think that's moretypical of material science and
chemistry because a lot of womenthen go on to pharmaceuticals
and other forms of chemistry,they don't necessarily go to the
semiconductor industry.
Speaker 3 (13:10):
Well, but so my research advisor was not, we
weren't doing research that wasgoing to lead that direction.
So my research was on lead-freesolder alloys, which that kind
of naturally led me into beingpart of the semiconductor
industry.
Another group, you know, withinthat my advisor's group was
working on aluminum alloys.
(13:31):
So that could lead toaerospace, but one of the people
who was working on aluminumended up at applied materials.
So we did end up going there.
I just found that was justresearch that I found
interesting.
And so, you know, that justkind of led there.
But I know, Ann, earlier youwere talking about a summer job
after high school.
(13:52):
My dad, when I was in highschool, worked at Linkabit,
which was the founders ofLinkabit eventually went to
found Qualcomm.
So at the time, they're workingon modems.
I had a summer job in likeprocess control, working with
the production planners, theproduction control folks.
(14:12):
And some of it was just theselittle logistics about what has
to go where.
And also when I became anengineer, then I understood, oh,
when the engineers realized,oh, they want this one little
different resistor.
And this was actually a lot ofit was before Surface Mount,
even right?
These are these drop-incomponents, these big chips that
were like this big with all thelittle pins on them.
(14:32):
They change one little thing.
And do they know the paperworkthat they are causing?
Now, obviously, they have areally good reason to change
that resistor value.
But then when I was anengineer, I, you know, you
understand.
Well, figure it out and don'tchange it five times because
you're gonna make it a pain inthe ass for the people in
production control.
So it was actually really coolto have the experience doing
that.
And you had something youwanted to say.
Speaker 2 (14:55):
The question of being a minority in your field is is
something where over the decadesI learned I pay a little
attention to it because if Ipaid attention to every little
thing, I wouldn't get my my jobdone.
I'm noted to be big on genderinclusive or neutral language
because, and the the way I seeit is um language reflects the
(15:19):
culture.
If you want to change theculture, change your language.
Definitely no man hours oranything.
And I had to like raise my handmultiple times at Intel.
It's like, why are you evenprinting this?
Like, this is the 90s.
But I also, my dad, my dad'sfrom Brooklyn, and so he used
guys a lot.
But in the 80s, he sent all hischildren this New York Times
(15:42):
op-ed piece that said womenaren't guys.
And so my father, who had threedaughters, then a son,
recognized, hey, I'm not doingthis right, I'm gonna let my
children know.
And I was like, I had to makean effort to use folks.
And I pointed out to peoplethat I've learned to just
(16:03):
reflect back the word folks andjust to point it out.
So I so that's one thing there.
There have definitely beentimes when I've been assumed to
be incompetent because I asked aquestion.
And when you read DeborahTannin's books, there's a social
(16:23):
linguistic cultures of womenask questions to like to go off
of it, but men asking questionsmeans you don't know something
and men don't want to know that,which is why there's the
generalization that men don'tcan't ask for directions when
they're lost.
The other thing I decided earlyon is that you know, I like
(16:43):
dresses and so I'm gonna wearthem.
And when I read Nitz's chapter,she said, yeah, when I decided
to embrace who I was, I'm like,no more t-shirts and jeans, I'm
wearing slacks and a blouse.
I went, yes, I get that, right?
That you you are a minority.
Be who you are in terms of tobe authentic, but you're also an
(17:06):
engineer.
And so be the engineer that youare.
So I to me it's this balanceyou can't ignore that you're a
minority and what happens attimes.
Uh, and that's also purposelywhen I wrote my chapter.
There's only something at thebeginning and at the end where I
even mention that, right?
I mentioned my mom, I grew upwith a mom, didn't hear a mom
(17:28):
say women can't do math, right?
But at the very end, I saysomething about it, but I just
wanted to talk about theengineering it was doing.
So that's that was a consciouschoice when I wrote my chapter.
Speaker 4 (17:42):
It's interesting being the only woman in the
room.
And it's happened more timesthan I'd like in my career.
Started in, you know, at MIT,you know, being in the in the
classes in electricalengineering, there's one woman
out of I don't know how manymen.
And I was like, hmm, okay, thisis interesting.
And that continued all throughthe undergrad and grad.
(18:04):
Actually, at Teradyne, therewas another female in my group,
so you know, there was five ofus, and there was two, it's a
good amount, 40%.
Uh so I didn't think anythingof it.
But when I went to Broadcom, Iwas the first uh female first
test development engineer.
And it took maybe, I think, sixmonths before the second one
came into uh the testdevelopment team.
And it was interesting becausethere was like 23 people, one
(18:27):
female.
Uh, and seven years later, whenI left, there was only eight
women test developmentengineers, but over 200 test
development engineers total.
So it was a small percentage.
And um it didn't change when Iwent to Max Linear.
I I did the best that I couldto bring in women into my group
(18:48):
uh and make them feel that theywere comfortable there, right?
So a couple of the the ladieswho were at um Broadcom, they
joined me at Max Linear.
We we brought in productleaders and testify majors who
were also female uh to help toencourage.
The crazy part was when I wentto synaptics and there was a VP
of operations there, I increasedthe percentage of the company
(19:11):
with you know women, not just bymyself, but I brought in 20
people within a year.
And there was a lot of femalesthat came in, and not just the
people who had used to work forme, as they did come over, uh,
but new women.
And they and everybody waslike, how need that?
How?
I am the VP of operations, Ihave a senior director of
(19:33):
product engineering who's afemale, I have a technical
director of test developmentwho's female, and that just
signals to other women that thisis a safe space, that they can
grow, that the company iswilling to invest in women.
Where sometimes, you know,other companies have bad raps
for it for not doing this, butit's just kind of almost
visibility.
(19:53):
And the men on my team werelike, but how did you find them?
Some of them came to me, right?
Because they're they noticedthis and it was abnormal.
But the fact that it's abnormalis a red flag.
We have to help the industry sothat it's no longer like a
beacon, hey, come to thiscompany because there's a female
BP of operations.
(20:14):
How do we you know ensure thatwe have more people, more women
in leadership?
And this is why I get myselfinvolved with the Global
Semiconductor Alliance Women'sLeadership Initiative.
I volunteer uh any chance I canfor the university program to
do panels, to do speaking.
Uh, I'm a mentor in the women'shardware mentorship program,
(20:34):
and I'm actually a part of theirpilot program for their
executive accelerator program.
But each one of them is isgeared towards helping to ensure
that women are always open andwelcome in regardless of what
level they are in semiconductorcompanies.
So it's it's super important tome.
Speaker 1 (20:54):
It's interesting that you mentioned um when you
talked about tests.
I've always noticed at everyany conference that I've gone
to, depending on the topic,tests always had the fewest
women.
There might be two other womenat the 3D test conference that I
would go to.
And MEMS had a lot more.
I don't know why, but like MEMSconferences always had way more
(21:17):
women than tests, and theneverything else fell somewhere
in between.
Um, it's a do you think it'sharder for a woman to follow a
traditional engineering andmanagement path?
And how did you navigate thatcorporate ladder?
Speaker 4 (21:31):
I think it is in the sense that we don't look, talk,
sound like the people who are inmanagement today.
And it's slowly changing,right?
So and I think that'll behelpful in the future.
Me, myself, I was extremelylucky.
I had a great uh great mentorin Mike Lechance.
(21:51):
We worked together at BrockPalm, and he was our vice
president of operation.
Uh, he retired for two years,and then he went to a small
company called McSenior, and hecalled and said, Hey Nita, I
think it's time you have yourown team.
And I was like, okay, yeah,you're right.
I have been looking for this,and I'd like to have that
(22:12):
opportunity.
And so he extended out to me,came looking for me, brought me
in, but he didn't stop there.
He helped me in understandingwhat it does this, you know,
what does the politics looklike?
How do you expose yourself todifferent things, to finance, to
um production, to supply chain,to executive staff.
And he was very instrumental uhin actually mentoring me
(22:36):
through that all.
And so I feel extremely luckythat I had that.
He's helped me since then.
I I can call him at any pointin time and talk to him.
This is where I thinkmentorship and sponsorship
become really important.
And if you don't have one inthe company that you're at,
there's external people that youcould reach out to in order to
get a mentor or sponsor.
But internally, you really needa sponsor to get you into other
(23:00):
leadership positions in theorganization.
They're gonna talk about youand you need somebody who's
gonna be able to talk about youin closed door situations and
put your name in the in the hat.
Speaker 1 (23:11):
And you know, I think that goes for if you're a woman
or a man, a newcomer to theindustry, because first of all,
your mentor was or is male,right?
Um, but there's newcomers,students coming into this
industry, not just women, andyou might end up with young men
who have women's mentors.
Speaker 2 (23:31):
I avoided management.
I I went up the technicalladder at Intel, but that also
means you as you climb up, youare leading teams on that.
And you know, there were menaround me.
Those are the people that Imentored or gave advice to.
There are ways to inspire womenjust by being visible and being
successful.
And so I had when like peoplewho knew my name.
(23:54):
Like I didn't know Pam Fulton,but when I met her, she
obviously she knew my namebecause we had worked for the
same department on differentcampuses, right?
And so to me, mentoring men isjust as, you know, is part of
it, right?
They're part of the population.
And things that I learned, Imostly learned from other men,
right?
I'm passing that down, right?
Speaker 1 (24:15):
So we could also say that it's less about your gender
and more about yourcapabilities and that you
learned from other engineers andpass that down to other
engineers.
Speaker 2 (24:24):
Yeah, that's kind of how I try to view it.
Uh, engineering is uh craft.
Craft is passed along bystories.
And so I think that's also whyin my chapter, I had written
stories from my own blog siteabout, well, here's some things
I did as an engineer, so I wasable to live on it.
But I think that's how youexplain and inspire.
It's like, well, this is whatengineering is about, not just,
(24:45):
oh, you get to do these coolthings.
Well, this is actually how wesolved a problem, or hear what
was cool about this technology.
And to me, it's just proven weare storytelling animals.
This is how you you learn.
A narrative is reallyimportant.
You could spout off facts orwhatever, oh, I did this, but it
was, you know, to me, it's theprocess, it's the solving the
(25:08):
problem that is fun, right?
And now I'm supporting peopletrying to solve technology
problems, or I'm learning abouttechnology problems and
explaining them to other people,right?
Explaining to my peers, well,this is what's going on about
X-ray inspections through thesilicon BS, right?
Speaker 1 (25:26):
Julia, do you think your decision to choose an
entrepreneurial path hadanything to do with being a
woman in the industry?
Speaker 3 (25:36):
I would say yes.
The official story I used totell in terms of how I
transitioned from being anengineer to writing, because
Francoise, you know that you andI met 20 years ago at Advanced
Packaging Magazine, was I wasalways the engineer who would
write.
And that is true, right?
(25:58):
I was the one writing thearticles for the trade magazines
when I was an engineer.
I was the one writing thequarterly reports for the
government contracts.
When I look back to college andmy engineering clinic project
for Douglas aircraft, I wasdoing more of the representative
at Douglas and writing thefinal report versus doing the
coding because I am not a fan ofdoing that.
Anyway, but the part that Ididn't tell until probably a
(26:22):
podcast interview that I did inmaybe 2018 was that a big part
of my decision had to do withbeing home with young children.
So my children were two andfour.
I was doing work on contract asan engineer.
I needed to be on site morehours than I could.
The younger one wouldn't nap atpreschool.
(26:43):
That's a whole longer story,but they said you have to pick
them up at noon.
I said, Well, I can't really dothis job if I can't be on site
more hours.
So I said, I need somethingmore flexible.
I reached out to Jeff Demonbecause he and I worked at NCHIP
together when I was anengineer.
And he was then with SolidState Technology magazine.
He said, Oh, actually, oursister publication, advanced
(27:06):
packaging, could use somebody.
So that was a job I could doflexible hours.
And it played both into mystrengths and to my desire for
flexibility.
And so it just made sense to dothat.
And that's kind of what I fellinto doing.
And sometimes I wonder whatwould have happened if I'd been
(27:28):
able to stay in engineering.
Who knows?
Speaker 1 (27:32):
I think that that is the experience that a lot of
women have in this industry,especially when they start to
have families.
And I think that'sunfortunately why a lot over
COVID dropped out, um, becauseit was just too hard to do both.
Even working from home was hardwith children at home.
Once you're there, they thinkthat you're there for them all
(27:52):
the time, right?
In the last few years, therewas a huge effort for diversity,
equity, inclusion initiatives,bringing more women into the
industry.
Do you think the current U.S.
administration's attack on DEIefforts will discourage young
women to pursue careers in STEM?
Speaker 3 (28:09):
I hope not.
It's interesting.
I recently heard from a youngwoman.
She graduated college in 2022,is currently a grad student, and
she wants to continue work inscience and actually to work in
public policy.
So I thought, well, that'sthat's really interesting.
And it's an it's a strangeenvironment right now to be
(28:31):
doing that.
But over the long haul, she'sgot decades ahead of her.
I don't know.
I think it it maybe dependsmore on the support that women
get both at home and whenthey're, you know, in school.
I mean, for example, HarveyMudd College, where I went, it's
now 50-50 male and femalestudents.
(28:51):
That was not the case when Iwas there.
So that makes a very differentenvironment.
Then they graduate and go offto work, and then and then
sometimes they find a cruelshock in the workplace.
So that's another issue.
But what do you all the rest ofyou think?
Speaker 2 (29:06):
I think the current administration's perspective is
misguided and it's um makes nosense for decades.
All the research has shown thatif there are more women
executives, people of colorexecutives, or in leadership
(29:27):
positions, a company'sprofitability goes up
significantly.
And and that's been true fordecades, right?
It's not just recently there.
So uh if a company is lookingat its numbers, then uh they
should look at that.
I would echo what Julia said,right?
And we're examples of it.
(29:47):
We had parents who weresupportive.
Also, we were in probably inschool systems.
I was in a school system thatMontgomery County, Maryland,
outside Washington DC, is one ofthe highly educated
environments.
So you're surrounded by peoplewhose parents are also
interested in in education.
And so I think that's havingparents, having an environment.
(30:11):
I never had a teacher told me Ican't study this, but I never
uh experienced that in alearning environment.
Speaker 4 (30:21):
It's a really difficult question.
Um and I'd like to think thatall of the work that you know
we've been putting into girls inSTEM, women in STEM, uh will be
able to, you know, to do to gothrough this particular
roadblock at the moment.
Um But it's it's interestingbecause there's a lot of
(30:45):
different things that havehappened.
Uh recently at the GSA Wish,heard Sylvia Ancevedo talk about
her time at the Girl Scouts,right?
She was CEO of the US GirlScout, and she put in the
cybersecurity badge and lots oftechnical badges in there.
So you think of all the girlsin across the US who are doing
(31:06):
Girl Scouts, who are being partof that, who are doing badges,
very STEM-oriented.
And then all of a sudden therewas a big increase of women in
cybersecurity, and they tracedit back to the badges that the
Girl Scouts were doing.
Interesting.
That's wild.
Speaker 1 (31:24):
This isn't that crazy.
That is really great.
I like to think, and when youtalk about um the studies and
the proof, the companies arelistening to that and paying
attention to that.
I don't think theadministration is.
I don't think they have shownum a history of following the
(31:47):
actual research.
It's kind of the same thingwith sustainability, as long as
the companies themselves pursuethat path and don't pave.
I've heard people are justchanging their DEI programs to
calling them something else, youknow.
Speaker 2 (32:01):
And I I think there's a the names have changed in
that, but I will say that uhsome companies are more
successful than others and howthey achieve numbers.
What I saw at Intel, and a lotof us felt that they were hiring
women outside in at thosehigher levels, they weren't
promoting within.
And so they were achievingtheir numbers, but not promoting
(32:25):
within.
I give them a ding on that one.
Speaker 1 (32:27):
After listening to the three of you talk and talk
about who your mentors were andhaving worked with a lot of men
in your lifetime, one of myconcerns is that the new
generation comes in, and thenthere's an us and them mentality
that the women aren't embracingthe fact that they're coming
into traditionally a man's worldand that most of the men are
(32:48):
very happy to help them and thatthey're just looking at them as
other engineers for the mostpart.
When we started Semi-Sisters,it was the women who be formed
semi-sisters weren't men haters.
They were in this industry andhad cultivated relationships
with the men in this industry.
And it wasn't, you know, towear suits and look like the
(33:08):
men, it was they just embracedthat, you know, it was all part
of being in the industry.
And I just hope that goingforward, we don't end up with
sort of animosity between themen and the women in the
industry.
Speaker 3 (33:22):
Yeah, definitely.
I mean, I think, you know, weneed to work together.
But some of it is if people aremaking assumptions just based
on their gender to find ways todissuade those.
And that kind of brings me backwhen I was first working for
advanced packaging and I'd showup at these conferences, people
(33:43):
would assume, oh, you must havea degree in English or
journalism.
And I'd say, there's nothingwrong with those.
Those are perfectly fine, yeah,perfectly fine degrees to get.
But no, that wasn't me.
Because, and then they'd startacting sometimes like I didn't
even know what a printed circuitboard was.
And then I'd tell them I have aPhD in material science.
I did my research on lecturersolar allies, blah, blah, blah.
(34:03):
And then their tone changes,right?
And said, you know, I was aprocess development engineer,
and all of a sudden theyrealized, oh, I can talk to her
like a peer who just maybehappens not to be familiar with
my specific situation that I'mdealing with at my company.
Yay.
Speaker 2 (34:22):
Yeah, I I will say that I have a similar
experience.
And I, as I started reportingor researching, I would just
say, just let me tell you mybackground so you know where I'm
coming from.
And I think the other engineersand executives really
appreciate being able to godeeper.
Speaker 1 (34:41):
I mean, I've heard them thank me, I think they like
talking that deep.
That's so funny because I havethe flip experience because I
don't have a degree inengineering and I'm always very
careful to tell people that.
But what I discovered that wasimportant about my role is that
everybody was super hype, superhyper-focused on what they did.
And if I'd asked a questionlike, well, how do you test
that?
Or what happens if the materialdoesn't work in a certain way?
(35:04):
And I realized that I wastalking to people from across
the supply chain, across themanufacturing process, and I was
learning a little bit about alot and putting it all together.
So my job was to connect thedot as a journalist so that
people who weren't readingeverything and learning
everything could see what wasgoing on in other aspects of the
(35:27):
industry.
And for me, it wasn't aboutbeing a woman in this industry,
it was about not being anengineer in this industry that
made it difficult or made peoplethink, oh, well, you don't
really know what you're talkingabout.
And I had a lot to prove.
And now that I've proved it,I'm done.
Speaker 3 (35:42):
Yay, yay.
And I think sometimes,Francoise, you would discount
you would, I don't know, youwould sometimes discount all
your years of experience in theindustry despite not having the
engineering degrees or the youknow real life experience as an
engineer, where yeah, you doreally learn a lot by talking to
people, interviewing them,writing about the stuff.
(36:04):
And you learn it, yeah, yousaid a little bit about a lot of
things.
Speaker 1 (36:08):
I often feel the same way.
We've talked about yourchapters, but we haven't talked
about the book itself.
In all of your chapters, youall talk about the importance of
communication um inengineering.
Can you tell a little bit aboutthat?
Speaker 2 (36:23):
I had a PhD advisor who trained us all how to give
presentations.
I mean, to the point whereinadvertently also trained us
how to give feedback on theirpresentations.
I have training on it becauseI'm passionate about it and I
know a lot about it.
And when I prepare apresentation, I feel like I'm
preparing for an Olympic event.
Like I really put a lot ofeffort, not in just the
(36:44):
practicing, but really thinkingabout what I want them to do
after the presentation.
I think also I'm an engineerwho liked writing her status
reports because my belief isengineers are paid for thinking
and writing is a reflectiveprocess.
I mean, you can get so caughtup in doing I need to do, do,
(37:06):
do, do, that you don't take timeto reflect.
And pausing and writing up justwhat you're doing creates such
value.
I would probably spend fivepercent of my time writing my
status report.
People are like, whoa, that's alot.
Like, nope, not if you thinkabout in percentage of what I'm
doing.
(37:26):
That doesn't seem like a lot tome since I spend a hundred
percent of my No, but when you'dsay, but I do that, they would
say you're spend four hourswriting your status report.
It's like, that's four hoursout of 80, 100 hours of work,
right?
It's really not that, right?
It's like that's a that's asmall pause.
So that's part of my belief andwhat those skills are so
(37:48):
useful.
Speaker 3 (37:50):
Yeah, so I mentioned being like the engineer who
would write, and that that issomewhat unusual.
And having edited a lot ofstuff that comes in from
engineers and scientists,there's a lot of them that you
realize, okay, they're reallysmart, but they don't do this.
And some of them, I think, justbelieve that they're not good
at writing, they can'tcommunicate that way.
Uh, you get them to try to do apresentation and they give you
(38:13):
a slide with I don't know howmany pieces of graphs and data,
and nobody can even make senseof it.
And so there's a greatopportunity to put more training
in and have that even early on.
And if they didn't get that incollege, you know, help people
understand in their careers thatif you can't explain what
(38:35):
you're doing in ways that yourcolleagues or the executives or
the person who has to sell thestuff can understand, it's gonna
be a real block.
And so we don't need to be thestereotype of the engineer who's
(38:55):
alone in their lab or on theircomputer and can't communicate
with anybody.
And having more women in thefield, I think, helps with that.
The men can learn it too.
Speaker 4 (39:05):
That's interesting.
Um, and I wish I would have hadAnn's class before I left MIT
because I had a big failure,right?
So a few years after startingwork, I was asked to give a
presentation at the TeradineUser Group conference.
And I was like, okay, sure, howhard could it be?
Man, was I wrong, right?
(39:27):
Everyone's like, no, don'tworry, it's 20 minutes, 10
slides, you'll be fine.
I practice a couple of times.
Uh, the day of thepresentation, I went up there
and I'm a Latina, I naturallyspeak fast.
And that day, I had a 20-minutepresentation went to N5.
And I was so utterlyembarrassed.
(39:49):
I was like really embarrassed.
I hid away for a little bit,but my boss came and found me.
He said, Nitza, we will we willfix this.
Don't worry, we will fix this.
And so we we, you know, once Icalmed down, we talked about
different strategies of how bestI could be a better presenter,
a better speaker.
And it was always talk in ourgroup meetings.
(40:11):
Um, be sure to talk at leastonce in any meeting I attended.
But then most importantly, talkto random strangers.
While ordering my morningcoffee, uh, I would make sorts
of all sorts of stories.
And when I was in Boston, therewas a Dunkin' Donuts on every
corner.
So that became my little ritualbefore going to work is go and
(40:32):
tell the story.
And that just made me feel morecomfortable.
Uh, the crazy thing, like 10years later, I had an engineer
who couldn't do uh a five-minutepresentation, and so I was
like, hmm, I need to dosomething about this.
And then a year later, my teamwas presenting at a conference,
and the two gentlemen, not maleor famous gentlemen, turned
(40:55):
their back to the audience and Iwas like, I really need to do
something about this.
And so I went and embarked on atwo-year journey with my team
to get them to a higher level ofcommunication.
And we started small, right?
Five minutes, just who you areas an individual, and then talk
about anything you'd like, andthen you know, what you're
doing, working on, and you know,we escalated the amount of time
(41:18):
they did this.
And it helped both uh, youknow, the men and the women in
my team just feel more confidentin themselves, being able to
communicate in meetings when itdidn't matter of whether or not
you're presenting something,just having a conversation,
asking questions, and thenpresenting anywhere from 20
(41:40):
minutes to an hour to 90minutes, and they all do well
now.
And so I really love that Ifailed because it put me on this
path and on this journey tohelp others be better at
communicating.
Uh, but it really sucked thatday, let me tell you.
It was really pretty bad.
Speaker 1 (41:57):
I love that story.
Can you each just summarize onereason why you think people
should read this book, women ormen?
Speaker 2 (42:06):
Because over 30 years ago, there was a book published
called Journeys of Women inScience and Engineering, No
Universal Contents.
I know for three of theeditors, they basically went
around and asked all these womenscientists and engineers these
questions.
And so they're kind of littlebiochapters.
But a lot of these women arereally famous.
Vera Rubin, the astronomer, andbut what I like about this
(42:28):
book, these are more, we aremore ordinary women.
We're like, we're we're nevergonna get the Nobel Prize or a
prize on that, but we're doingwork.
And I think there's value inhaving role models who are like
seem like more like regularpeople.
Like they're not, you know,we're not like this big, you
know, uh famous person in ourfield or anything like that.
(42:49):
And so I think that's the valuein the book is hearing people's
career paths, women's careerpaths, who, you know, um are
just regular engineers orscientists.
Speaker 1 (43:02):
People can identify with that more.
Yeah, that they could actuallydo it.
Speaker 3 (43:09):
There are a lot of diverse perspectives within the
broad women in STEM umbrella.
And it's not there's just onepath you need to follow.
And so I would say, especiallyfor well, for young women
thinking about their careers,there's like, oh, here's some
examples of women who have donethis.
Uh for maybe readers who are alittle bit older or maybe
(43:35):
thinking of a career change.
Here's again, also examples.
And even for, say, the youngmen to say, there's some really
smart women out there, andthey're gonna be your
colleagues, and they theirvoices deserve to be heard.
Speaker 4 (43:55):
Actually, it's funny.
Ann had sent me a messagesaying, Hey, I think you should
be a part of this.
And I was like, Why should Iwrite my story?
Why me?
And you you have to go througha little bit of self-reflection,
and then I start thinkingabout, well, I have a lot of
godchildren, I have a lot ofkids that I've spoiled, and I
(44:18):
want to be an example for them.
I want them to be able to say,my Nina, my tia, uh, she did
something else, right?
She's an engineer, she does allsorts of science-y stuff, but
she also wrote a chapter in abook that I can point to, that I
can hand off to somebody else.
Uh, and I wanted to, you know,be that person that somebody's
(44:40):
reading about.
And then they're like, oh, youknow, that Nietzsche, she did
something cool.
I want to do something likeher.
And so it was an interestingkind of journey to go on.
And it was it all started witha simple invitation for man, and
and then going through thiswhole journey.
Uh, so it it's nice to holdthat physical book in your hand
(45:02):
and then hand it to someone elseand say, This is my story.
And then they start to readabout it.
They read start, maybe startwith your story, but then they
go to Julia's and then they goto Ann's and then to other women
within the book, and thensaying, just like Julia was
mentioning, everybody doesthings a little differently.
So I don't have to go in astraight line to get from point
(45:22):
A to point B.
I can go in as many directionsas I like, and I can end up
where I'd like to end up.
So I think that's why I I likebeing part of this book.
Speaker 1 (45:34):
I like the fact that it covers all different
opportunities in STEM because Ithink sometimes there's a
disconnect between what youstudy in college and university
or even high school and how youcan put that to work as a job to
earn a living, doing somethingthat you're passionate about.
Because when you do somethingthat you're passionate about, it
feels less like work, right?
(45:55):
So I want to thank all of youfor joining me today.
I want to direct listeners toif you want to learn more about
this book, you can go tostrategic reliability
solutions.com slash empoweringwomen in STEM pioneering paths
to shape the future.
And we'll also be putting linksin the show notes for where you
(46:17):
can learn more, where you canbuy the book, um, and to any of
these websites that um peoplewant to go.
Thanks everybody.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Hey everyone.
Only three more episodes to gofor season five of the 3D
Insights podcast.
Next week, we bring you thelast in a series of episodes
(46:40):
from Nordson Test and Inspectionrecorded live at
Producttronica.
Our final two episodes will bein celebration of the 50th
anniversary of Semicon Europa.
The first features an interviewwith Semi-Europe's Leif
Altimime, Luke Vandenhoop ofIMEC, and Christian Koitsch of
ESMC.
And our farewell episode willfeature conversations with our
member companies and willdiscuss the future of advanced
(47:02):
packaging in Europe.
There's lots more to come, sotune in next time to the 3D
Insights podcast.
The 3D Insights podcast is aproduction of 3D Insights LLC.
This episode of the 3D InCites podcast is sponsored
by Teradyne.
As AI and cloud computing drivesemiconductor complexity,
Teradyne's test solutions forsemiconductors and electronics
lets customers consistently meettheir quality standards.
Its advanced collaborative andmobile robots support
manufacturing and warehouseoperations for companies of all
(00:21):
sizes.
With cutting-edge solutions fortoday's complex devices,
Teradyne is powering the pursuitof innovation.
Stay connected at Teradyne.com.
Speaker (00:39):
Hi there.
I'm Francoise von Trapp, andthis is the 3D Insights Podcast.
Speaker 1 (00:50):
Hi everyone.
This week we've got a specialepisode that brings awareness to
a topic that is near and dearto my heart, and that is how to
encourage young women to pursuecareers in STEM, which is rather
ironic for me, actually, as Inever set out to be a scientist
or a technologist, and I stillam not one, but here I am, a
woman in the semiconductorindustry.
(01:12):
So I think the only thing moreinspirational than reading
success stories is hearing aboutthem firsthand.
So today I'm talking with threewomen who intentionally set out
on a STEM career path.
They recently contributedchapters to a new book called
Empowering Women in STEM: Pioneering Paths to Shape the (01:27):
undefined
Future.
The book serves to remind usthat the future of STEM thrives
on diversity, innovation, andunique perspectives that women
bring to the table.
Contributors to the book hailedfrom a myriad of STEM
professions, from military andculinary to research, medicine,
and technology.
Now, as it happens, all ofthree of my guests today pursued
(01:50):
careers in the semiconductorindustry, and I'm looking
forward to hearing theirstories.
So welcome to the podcast.
Anne Meixner , Julia Freer,and Nisa Basoco.
Thanks.
Glad to be here.
I'm happy to be here.
Thanks for having us.
I'm super excited for thisconversation, but before we get
started, I always ask people tointroduce themselves.
Could you each just have alittle bit about yourself and
your current roles?
(02:10):
Ann, why don't you go first?
Sure.
Speaker 2 (02:12):
My name is Ann Meixner and I've worked in
the semiconductor industry forover 40 years.
I have two uh current paidgigs.
I am a freelance contributor touh semiconductor engineering
and online publication.
And I am the heterogeneousintegration roadmap fellow,
(02:33):
which is I get to support anall-volunteer effort to uh
create a technology roadmap foradvanced packaging solutions and
in various applications.
So that's exciting.
Speaker 1 (02:45):
Oh, that's excellent.
And Nitsa, how about you?
Speaker 4 (02:49):
Um I've been in the semiconductor industry for about
a quarter of a century.
I'm I'm dating myself.
I started my career at Teradineas a factory applications
engineer.
And 20 some odd years later,I'm back at Teradine.
I started um two years ago astheir technology and market
strategist and have recentlytransitioned into their mobility
(03:10):
business unit manager.
So a little morebusiness-oriented type role.
Speaker 3 (03:14):
Okay, and Julia.
Hello, I am the founder ofMaterial Value Consulting, where
I work with manufacturingcompanies in several different
sectors, includingsemiconductors, to really help
them better tell their storiesaround both product excellence
and sustainability.
(03:35):
And speaking of that, I've beenwriting a sustainability
one-on-one column for 3DInsights since 2021.
And I'm also the author ofseveral books.
And before that, you were inindustry, correct?
Yes, I did start my career as aprocess development engineer in
semiconductor packaging.
(03:56):
And this audience actuallyknows what that is back in the
90s.
Speaker 1 (03:59):
And, by the way, Nita quarter of a century sounds a
lot longer than 25 years, butAnne's got you beat at 40 years.
That's more than a quarter of acentury.
When you're relatively a baby,this industry.
Speaker 2 (04:13):
I am in the 70s, I am a baby.
So that's a lot.
I I count my summer jobs.
You count your summer jobs.
Okay.
Well, because actually some ofthem were related to the
semiconductor industries.
Speaker 1 (04:24):
Does that have anything to do with the fact
that your parents were also inthe industry?
You talked about how youfollowed in your parents'
engineering footsteps in yourchapter of the book.
Speaker 2 (04:36):
My father was uh worked as an engineer at the
Naval Research Lab.
I grew up inside Washington,D.C.
And so when I was graduatingfrom high school, he said, here,
fill out this application.
So I had right out of highschool, you know, a summer job
that was then called theNational Bureau of Standards.
And then I went back a coupleof years later and worked in one
of the semiconductor divisionshelping some scient scientists
(04:59):
um build an elopsometer thatthey were creating for to create
standards and do umexperimental research there.
So I had a little taste foreven a summer job, right?
And ellipsometers apparently isstill used today in the
semiconductor industry.
Speaker 1 (05:16):
Well, there you go.
Yeah.
And so then was it a naturalprogression for you to study
engineering and go on to work atIBM?
Speaker 2 (05:25):
It was a natural choice because of having a
father who was an engineer andhaving a mother who said, you
know, don't get a degree inmath, get a degree in
engineering, you'll get paidmore.
Because I think that was herexperience to get a degree in
math and not engineering, butbecause she didn't have that
opportunity there.
That just seemed to be thenatural choice.
(05:45):
And because I took a break fromgoing to school, I took a job
at IBM and that hooked me intothe semiconductor industry
because I became fascinated bydefects.
unknown (05:57):
Okay.
Speaker 1 (05:58):
So that's a shared commonality of the three of you
that you all had support andencouragement from your families
to pursue degrees in STEM.
Um, do you think you would haveif you hadn't had that support?
Speaker 3 (06:13):
It's hard to know.
I mean, it's almost likesaying, if we'd been born into a
different family, what pathwould we have taken?
How could we know this?
Right.
I guess, I mean, having parentswho are scientists, I remember
early on, I don't know what,like in elementary school, we're
asked to think of possiblecareers.
And the two I thought of weremusician and chemist.
(06:35):
It just that's what occurred tome when I was nine years old or
what have you.
Because, like, okay, those arethings that people do in my
family.
Right.
Speaker 1 (06:43):
And you've done both of those things, sort of.
Sort of.
Sort of, not chemist, but Imean you've been a musician.
You are a musician.
Yes.
And you actually left theindustry for a little while to
focus on your music and thencame back.
And so, how about you?
You know, how did you end uppursuing that STEM path?
Speaker 4 (07:02):
Funny, um, you say whether or not I'd actually
pursue STEM.
I think, regardless of where Iwas at, I always loved math.
It's almost like math andnumbers were always following
me.
And they were in my brain, andI had to think about them, and
they they wanted to, they theywanted attention.
Um, but it was also acombination of my parents plus
(07:24):
uh my uh teachers when I wasgrowing up.
Recently I've been thinkingabout you know, my second grade
teacher, my fourth gradeteacher, and everybody else
along the way, and they werevery helpful in trying to see,
oh, okay, she knows all thisstuff.
What else could we teach her inmathematics?
And I was just naturallyinclined to it.
Uh, but my parents, especiallymy dad, like he would, you know,
(07:46):
we my mom and my dad actuallywould go to the grocery store
and they were like, okay, tallyeverything up.
If you're within a quarter withtax, then uh you would get a
candy.
And so I was all over it, youknow.
My brothers and sisters werealways trying.
So you also had to be first.
You couldn't just be, you know,you couldn't just be right, you
had to be first.
So it was that little bit ofcompetition there at the grocery
(08:09):
store for that little, youknow, caramels, because I love
caramels.
We also would do flashcards,right?
Um, subtraction,multiplication, uh, and whatnot.
And so there was a lot oflittle games that my parents
played with us uh throughout.
And they were my favorites,maybe not my sisters and my
brothers, but they were mine.
Uh so you know, math was alwaysthere.
I remember one day, you know,my dad was coming home from work
(08:31):
and he was late.
And though I loved math, I alsoloved reading.
So I was on the in the livingroom sofa reading a book.
I was like, where is he?
And he was a little late thereand he came in, uh, but he was
carrying all these like youknow, rolled up pieces of paper.
And I'm like, well, what'sthat?
Uh so curiosity, of course, gotthe better of me.
I put my book down and he'slike, Oh, well, I'm late because
(08:54):
we're trying to figure out thisproblem at work, and this
machine's not working quiteright.
And I was like, Well, whatseems to be the problem?
So got to the kitchen table,rolled out the schematics, and
he started just answering myquestions left and right.
And as a young kid, I'mthinking, oh, I'm helping my
dad, this is awesome.
And I and I, you know, and hewas great.
Just, you know, he answered allmy questions and my different
(09:17):
curiosities.
We went in roundabout circleseverywhere.
And the next day, he actuallycame home early and he was like,
Yes, we fixed the problem.
Uh ever since then, I've beenhooked, right?
I needed to solve problems andfigure out how to solve
problems.
And I found that the best wayto do it was through mathematics
first and then throughengineering.
(09:37):
So that's how I ended up.
Speaker 3 (09:38):
Yeah, Nietzsche, I think the bit in your chapter
where you talk about basicallydiscovering the concept of
infinity at the age of six, thatis rather unusual.
And I know I have a son who's amath genius, so I can imagine I
don't know that he exactly didthat, but me know maybe he
might, he might have alreadydiscovered it by that age.
So I think there's acombination of just natural
(10:02):
inclination and interest andbeing exposed to things.
Speaker 4 (10:06):
I was, we were going to my grandmother's house and I
was just staring out the window,had forgotten my book, which
met made me put it down.
So then I'm just looking at thepath and just imagining one
number being laid down afteranother after another, just like
bricks on the road.
Then I realized I was like,hmm, I can't think of the
biggest number.
Like, what's the biggest numberI have?
(10:26):
It's this number.
No, it's this number, no, it'sthis number.
I can always add one tosomething.
And I asked my parents, they'relike, yeah, there's a thing,
there's a concept calledinfinity.
I was like, what?
Uh and as a little kid, youdon't, you know, there's a lot
of terminology you don't know, alot of concepts you don't know.
But it was uh something thatstayed in my head for a very
long time of like, hmm, whatelse don't I know?
(10:48):
And should I be thinking anddaydreaming more than maybe
reading so much?
But uh you do a little bit ofboth these days.
Speaker 1 (10:56):
I think both are very, very important.
Um, I think reading is soimportant for developing
empathy.
Um but like fiction especially.
But it's funny because you allhad interests in science and you
all had encouragement from yourparents to pursue those
interests as women, as girls,which doesn't happen everywhere.
(11:18):
I went and gave a talk at theSociety of Women Engineers in
Salzburg, I don't know, six orseven years ago.
And one of the efforts therewas to encourage parents to
encourage their daughters and toget their daughters to study
STEM really required parentalsupport.
So it may feel to the three ofyou that yeah, it was just
(11:41):
natural, but you're veryfortunate because not everybody
would think that.
I didn't study STEM, had nointerest in studying STEM.
But at the time of when I wasthinking about college, there
weren't a lot of girls goinginto engineering and math.
And if they did, especiallymath, they were coming out and
teaching.
That's changed so much now.
(12:03):
Um, how have you experiencedbeing a woman in the industry?
What has it been like for eachof you?
Speaker 3 (12:11):
So it's interesting.
In my first job out of gradschool, there were actually a
lot of women at the company.
Um, the VP of the RD departmentwas a woman.
Um, it was also very young,like all the VPs, except for one
of them, were under 35.
(12:32):
So it was this sense of we werethe young people out there to
conquer something.
Anyway, but there were otherwomen around.
And another thing that when Iwas writing my chapter and I
thought back and I looked backat some of my notes from grad
school, my research group at UCBerkeley was about 50-50,
(12:54):
male-female.
And that was in the materialscience.
Speaker 1 (12:56):
Material science.
See, I think that's moretypical of material science and
chemistry because a lot of womenthen go on to pharmaceuticals
and other forms of chemistry,they don't necessarily go to the
semiconductor industry.
Speaker 3 (13:10):
Well, but so my research advisor was not, we
weren't doing research that wasgoing to lead that direction.
So my research was on lead-freesolder alloys, which that kind
of naturally led me into beingpart of the semiconductor
industry.
Another group, you know, withinthat my advisor's group was
working on aluminum alloys.
(13:31):
So that could lead toaerospace, but one of the people
who was working on aluminumended up at applied materials.
So we did end up going there.
I just found that was justresearch that I found
interesting.
And so, you know, that justkind of led there.
But I know, Ann, earlier youwere talking about a summer job
after high school.
(13:52):
My dad, when I was in highschool, worked at Linkabit,
which was the founders ofLinkabit eventually went to
found Qualcomm.
So at the time, they're workingon modems.
I had a summer job in likeprocess control, working with
the production planners, theproduction control folks.
(14:12):
And some of it was just theselittle logistics about what has
to go where.
And also when I became anengineer, then I understood, oh,
when the engineers realized,oh, they want this one little
different resistor.
And this was actually a lot ofit was before Surface Mount,
even right?
These are these drop-incomponents, these big chips that
were like this big with all thelittle pins on them.
(14:32):
They change one little thing.
And do they know the paperworkthat they are causing?
Now, obviously, they have areally good reason to change
that resistor value.
But then when I was anengineer, I, you know, you
understand.
Well, figure it out and don'tchange it five times because
you're gonna make it a pain inthe ass for the people in
production control.
So it was actually really coolto have the experience doing
that.
And you had something youwanted to say.
Speaker 2 (14:55):
The question of being a minority in your field is is
something where over the decadesI learned I pay a little
attention to it because if Ipaid attention to every little
thing, I wouldn't get my my jobdone.
I'm noted to be big on genderinclusive or neutral language
because, and the the way I seeit is um language reflects the
(15:19):
culture.
If you want to change theculture, change your language.
Definitely no man hours oranything.
And I had to like raise my handmultiple times at Intel.
It's like, why are you evenprinting this?
Like, this is the 90s.
But I also, my dad, my dad'sfrom Brooklyn, and so he used
guys a lot.
But in the 80s, he sent all hischildren this New York Times
(15:42):
op-ed piece that said womenaren't guys.
And so my father, who had threedaughters, then a son,
recognized, hey, I'm not doingthis right, I'm gonna let my
children know.
And I was like, I had to makean effort to use folks.
And I pointed out to peoplethat I've learned to just
(16:03):
reflect back the word folks andjust to point it out.
So I so that's one thing there.
There have definitely beentimes when I've been assumed to
be incompetent because I asked aquestion.
And when you read DeborahTannin's books, there's a social
(16:23):
linguistic cultures of womenask questions to like to go off
of it, but men asking questionsmeans you don't know something
and men don't want to know that,which is why there's the
generalization that men don'tcan't ask for directions when
they're lost.
The other thing I decided earlyon is that you know, I like
(16:43):
dresses and so I'm gonna wearthem.
And when I read Nitz's chapter,she said, yeah, when I decided
to embrace who I was, I'm like,no more t-shirts and jeans, I'm
wearing slacks and a blouse.
I went, yes, I get that, right?
That you you are a minority.
Be who you are in terms of tobe authentic, but you're also an
(17:06):
engineer.
And so be the engineer that youare.
So I to me it's this balanceyou can't ignore that you're a
minority and what happens attimes.
Uh, and that's also purposelywhen I wrote my chapter.
There's only something at thebeginning and at the end where I
even mention that, right?
I mentioned my mom, I grew upwith a mom, didn't hear a mom
(17:28):
say women can't do math, right?
But at the very end, I saysomething about it, but I just
wanted to talk about theengineering it was doing.
So that's that was a consciouschoice when I wrote my chapter.
Speaker 4 (17:42):
It's interesting being the only woman in the
room.
And it's happened more timesthan I'd like in my career.
Started in, you know, at MIT,you know, being in the in the
classes in electricalengineering, there's one woman
out of I don't know how manymen.
And I was like, hmm, okay, thisis interesting.
And that continued all throughthe undergrad and grad.
(18:04):
Actually, at Teradyne, therewas another female in my group,
so you know, there was five ofus, and there was two, it's a
good amount, 40%.
Uh so I didn't think anythingof it.
But when I went to Broadcom, Iwas the first uh female first
test development engineer.
And it took maybe, I think, sixmonths before the second one
came into uh the testdevelopment team.
And it was interesting becausethere was like 23 people, one
(18:27):
female.
Uh, and seven years later, whenI left, there was only eight
women test developmentengineers, but over 200 test
development engineers total.
So it was a small percentage.
And um it didn't change when Iwent to Max Linear.
I I did the best that I couldto bring in women into my group
(18:48):
uh and make them feel that theywere comfortable there, right?
So a couple of the the ladieswho were at um Broadcom, they
joined me at Max Linear.
We we brought in productleaders and testify majors who
were also female uh to help toencourage.
The crazy part was when I wentto synaptics and there was a VP
of operations there, I increasedthe percentage of the company
(19:11):
with you know women, not just bymyself, but I brought in 20
people within a year.
And there was a lot of femalesthat came in, and not just the
people who had used to work forme, as they did come over, uh,
but new women.
And they and everybody waslike, how need that?
How?
I am the VP of operations, Ihave a senior director of
(19:33):
product engineering who's afemale, I have a technical
director of test developmentwho's female, and that just
signals to other women that thisis a safe space, that they can
grow, that the company iswilling to invest in women.
Where sometimes, you know,other companies have bad raps
for it for not doing this, butit's just kind of almost
visibility.
(19:53):
And the men on my team werelike, but how did you find them?
Some of them came to me, right?
Because they're they noticedthis and it was abnormal.
But the fact that it's abnormalis a red flag.
We have to help the industry sothat it's no longer like a
beacon, hey, come to thiscompany because there's a female
BP of operations.
(20:14):
How do we you know ensure thatwe have more people, more women
in leadership?
And this is why I get myselfinvolved with the Global
Semiconductor Alliance Women'sLeadership Initiative.
I volunteer uh any chance I canfor the university program to
do panels, to do speaking.
Uh, I'm a mentor in the women'shardware mentorship program,
(20:34):
and I'm actually a part of theirpilot program for their
executive accelerator program.
But each one of them is isgeared towards helping to ensure
that women are always open andwelcome in regardless of what
level they are in semiconductorcompanies.
So it's it's super important tome.
Speaker 1 (20:54):
It's interesting that you mentioned um when you
talked about tests.
I've always noticed at everyany conference that I've gone
to, depending on the topic,tests always had the fewest
women.
There might be two other womenat the 3D test conference that I
would go to.
And MEMS had a lot more.
I don't know why, but like MEMSconferences always had way more
(21:17):
women than tests, and theneverything else fell somewhere
in between.
Um, it's a do you think it'sharder for a woman to follow a
traditional engineering andmanagement path?
And how did you navigate thatcorporate ladder?
Speaker 4 (21:31):
I think it is in the sense that we don't look, talk,
sound like the people who are inmanagement today.
And it's slowly changing,right?
So and I think that'll behelpful in the future.
Me, myself, I was extremelylucky.
I had a great uh great mentorin Mike Lechance.
(21:51):
We worked together at BrockPalm, and he was our vice
president of operation.
Uh, he retired for two years,and then he went to a small
company called McSenior, and hecalled and said, Hey Nita, I
think it's time you have yourown team.
And I was like, okay, yeah,you're right.
I have been looking for this,and I'd like to have that
(22:12):
opportunity.
And so he extended out to me,came looking for me, brought me
in, but he didn't stop there.
He helped me in understandingwhat it does this, you know,
what does the politics looklike?
How do you expose yourself todifferent things, to finance, to
um production, to supply chain,to executive staff.
And he was very instrumental uhin actually mentoring me
(22:36):
through that all.
And so I feel extremely luckythat I had that.
He's helped me since then.
I I can call him at any pointin time and talk to him.
This is where I thinkmentorship and sponsorship
become really important.
And if you don't have one inthe company that you're at,
there's external people that youcould reach out to in order to
get a mentor or sponsor.
But internally, you really needa sponsor to get you into other
(23:00):
leadership positions in theorganization.
They're gonna talk about youand you need somebody who's
gonna be able to talk about youin closed door situations and
put your name in the in the hat.
Speaker 1 (23:11):
And you know, I think that goes for if you're a woman
or a man, a newcomer to theindustry, because first of all,
your mentor was or is male,right?
Um, but there's newcomers,students coming into this
industry, not just women, andyou might end up with young men
who have women's mentors.
Speaker 2 (23:31):
I avoided management.
I I went up the technicalladder at Intel, but that also
means you as you climb up, youare leading teams on that.
And you know, there were menaround me.
Those are the people that Imentored or gave advice to.
There are ways to inspire womenjust by being visible and being
successful.
And so I had when like peoplewho knew my name.
(23:54):
Like I didn't know Pam Fulton,but when I met her, she
obviously she knew my namebecause we had worked for the
same department on differentcampuses, right?
And so to me, mentoring men isjust as, you know, is part of
it, right?
They're part of the population.
And things that I learned, Imostly learned from other men,
right?
I'm passing that down, right?
Speaker 1 (24:15):
So we could also say that it's less about your gender
and more about yourcapabilities and that you
learned from other engineers andpass that down to other
engineers.
Speaker 2 (24:24):
Yeah, that's kind of how I try to view it.
Uh, engineering is uh craft.
Craft is passed along bystories.
And so I think that's also whyin my chapter, I had written
stories from my own blog siteabout, well, here's some things
I did as an engineer, so I wasable to live on it.
But I think that's how youexplain and inspire.
It's like, well, this is whatengineering is about, not just,
(24:45):
oh, you get to do these coolthings.
Well, this is actually how wesolved a problem, or hear what
was cool about this technology.
And to me, it's just proven weare storytelling animals.
This is how you you learn.
A narrative is reallyimportant.
You could spout off facts orwhatever, oh, I did this, but it
was, you know, to me, it's theprocess, it's the solving the
(25:08):
problem that is fun, right?
And now I'm supporting peopletrying to solve technology
problems, or I'm learning abouttechnology problems and
explaining them to other people,right?
Explaining to my peers, well,this is what's going on about
X-ray inspections through thesilicon BS, right?
Speaker 1 (25:26):
Julia, do you think your decision to choose an
entrepreneurial path hadanything to do with being a
woman in the industry?
Speaker 3 (25:36):
I would say yes.
The official story I used totell in terms of how I
transitioned from being anengineer to writing, because
Francoise, you know that you andI met 20 years ago at Advanced
Packaging Magazine, was I wasalways the engineer who would
write.
And that is true, right?
(25:58):
I was the one writing thearticles for the trade magazines
when I was an engineer.
I was the one writing thequarterly reports for the
government contracts.
When I look back to college andmy engineering clinic project
for Douglas aircraft, I wasdoing more of the representative
at Douglas and writing thefinal report versus doing the
coding because I am not a fan ofdoing that.
Anyway, but the part that Ididn't tell until probably a
(26:22):
podcast interview that I did inmaybe 2018 was that a big part
of my decision had to do withbeing home with young children.
So my children were two andfour.
I was doing work on contract asan engineer.
I needed to be on site morehours than I could.
The younger one wouldn't nap atpreschool.
(26:43):
That's a whole longer story,but they said you have to pick
them up at noon.
I said, Well, I can't really dothis job if I can't be on site
more hours.
So I said, I need somethingmore flexible.
I reached out to Jeff Demonbecause he and I worked at NCHIP
together when I was anengineer.
And he was then with SolidState Technology magazine.
He said, Oh, actually, oursister publication, advanced
(27:06):
packaging, could use somebody.
So that was a job I could doflexible hours.
And it played both into mystrengths and to my desire for
flexibility.
And so it just made sense to dothat.
And that's kind of what I fellinto doing.
And sometimes I wonder whatwould have happened if I'd been
(27:28):
able to stay in engineering.
Who knows?
Speaker 1 (27:32):
I think that that is the experience that a lot of
women have in this industry,especially when they start to
have families.
And I think that'sunfortunately why a lot over
COVID dropped out, um, becauseit was just too hard to do both.
Even working from home was hardwith children at home.
Once you're there, they thinkthat you're there for them all
(27:52):
the time, right?
In the last few years, therewas a huge effort for diversity,
equity, inclusion initiatives,bringing more women into the
industry.
Do you think the current U.S.
administration's attack on DEIefforts will discourage young
women to pursue careers in STEM?
Speaker 3 (28:09):
I hope not.
It's interesting.
I recently heard from a youngwoman.
She graduated college in 2022,is currently a grad student, and
she wants to continue work inscience and actually to work in
public policy.
So I thought, well, that'sthat's really interesting.
And it's an it's a strangeenvironment right now to be
(28:31):
doing that.
But over the long haul, she'sgot decades ahead of her.
I don't know.
I think it it maybe dependsmore on the support that women
get both at home and whenthey're, you know, in school.
I mean, for example, HarveyMudd College, where I went, it's
now 50-50 male and femalestudents.
(28:51):
That was not the case when Iwas there.
So that makes a very differentenvironment.
Then they graduate and go offto work, and then and then
sometimes they find a cruelshock in the workplace.
So that's another issue.
But what do you all the rest ofyou think?
Speaker 2 (29:06):
I think the current administration's perspective is
misguided and it's um makes nosense for decades.
All the research has shown thatif there are more women
executives, people of colorexecutives, or in leadership
(29:27):
positions, a company'sprofitability goes up
significantly.
And and that's been true fordecades, right?
It's not just recently there.
So uh if a company is lookingat its numbers, then uh they
should look at that.
I would echo what Julia said,right?
And we're examples of it.
(29:47):
We had parents who weresupportive.
Also, we were in probably inschool systems.
I was in a school system thatMontgomery County, Maryland,
outside Washington DC, is one ofthe highly educated
environments.
So you're surrounded by peoplewhose parents are also
interested in in education.
And so I think that's havingparents, having an environment.
(30:11):
I never had a teacher told me Ican't study this, but I never
uh experienced that in alearning environment.
Speaker 4 (30:21):
It's a really difficult question.
Um and I'd like to think thatall of the work that you know
we've been putting into girls inSTEM, women in STEM, uh will be
able to, you know, to do to gothrough this particular
roadblock at the moment.
Um But it's it's interestingbecause there's a lot of
(30:45):
different things that havehappened.
Uh recently at the GSA Wish,heard Sylvia Ancevedo talk about
her time at the Girl Scouts,right?
She was CEO of the US GirlScout, and she put in the
cybersecurity badge and lots oftechnical badges in there.
So you think of all the girlsin across the US who are doing
(31:06):
Girl Scouts, who are being partof that, who are doing badges,
very STEM-oriented.
And then all of a sudden therewas a big increase of women in
cybersecurity, and they tracedit back to the badges that the
Girl Scouts were doing.
Interesting.
That's wild.
Speaker 1 (31:24):
This isn't that crazy.
That is really great.
I like to think, and when youtalk about um the studies and
the proof, the companies arelistening to that and paying
attention to that.
I don't think theadministration is.
I don't think they have shownum a history of following the
(31:47):
actual research.
It's kind of the same thingwith sustainability, as long as
the companies themselves pursuethat path and don't pave.
I've heard people are justchanging their DEI programs to
calling them something else, youknow.
Speaker 2 (32:01):
And I I think there's a the names have changed in
that, but I will say that uhsome companies are more
successful than others and howthey achieve numbers.
What I saw at Intel, and a lotof us felt that they were hiring
women outside in at thosehigher levels, they weren't
promoting within.
And so they were achievingtheir numbers, but not promoting
(32:25):
within.
I give them a ding on that one.
Speaker 1 (32:27):
After listening to the three of you talk and talk
about who your mentors were andhaving worked with a lot of men
in your lifetime, one of myconcerns is that the new
generation comes in, and thenthere's an us and them mentality
that the women aren't embracingthe fact that they're coming
into traditionally a man's worldand that most of the men are
(32:48):
very happy to help them and thatthey're just looking at them as
other engineers for the mostpart.
When we started Semi-Sisters,it was the women who be formed
semi-sisters weren't men haters.
They were in this industry andhad cultivated relationships
with the men in this industry.
And it wasn't, you know, towear suits and look like the
(33:08):
men, it was they just embracedthat, you know, it was all part
of being in the industry.
And I just hope that goingforward, we don't end up with
sort of animosity between themen and the women in the
industry.
Speaker 3 (33:22):
Yeah, definitely.
I mean, I think, you know, weneed to work together.
But some of it is if people aremaking assumptions just based
on their gender to find ways todissuade those.
And that kind of brings me backwhen I was first working for
advanced packaging and I'd showup at these conferences, people
(33:43):
would assume, oh, you must havea degree in English or
journalism.
And I'd say, there's nothingwrong with those.
Those are perfectly fine, yeah,perfectly fine degrees to get.
But no, that wasn't me.
Because, and then they'd startacting sometimes like I didn't
even know what a printed circuitboard was.
And then I'd tell them I have aPhD in material science.
I did my research on lecturersolar allies, blah, blah, blah.
(34:03):
And then their tone changes,right?
And said, you know, I was aprocess development engineer,
and all of a sudden theyrealized, oh, I can talk to her
like a peer who just maybehappens not to be familiar with
my specific situation that I'mdealing with at my company.
Yay.
Speaker 2 (34:22):
Yeah, I I will say that I have a similar
experience.
And I, as I started reportingor researching, I would just
say, just let me tell you mybackground so you know where I'm
coming from.
And I think the other engineersand executives really
appreciate being able to godeeper.
Speaker 1 (34:41):
I mean, I've heard them thank me, I think they like
talking that deep.
That's so funny because I havethe flip experience because I
don't have a degree inengineering and I'm always very
careful to tell people that.
But what I discovered that wasimportant about my role is that
everybody was super hype, superhyper-focused on what they did.
And if I'd asked a questionlike, well, how do you test
that?
Or what happens if the materialdoesn't work in a certain way?
(35:04):
And I realized that I wastalking to people from across
the supply chain, across themanufacturing process, and I was
learning a little bit about alot and putting it all together.
So my job was to connect thedot as a journalist so that
people who weren't readingeverything and learning
everything could see what wasgoing on in other aspects of the
(35:27):
industry.
And for me, it wasn't aboutbeing a woman in this industry,
it was about not being anengineer in this industry that
made it difficult or made peoplethink, oh, well, you don't
really know what you're talkingabout.
And I had a lot to prove.
And now that I've proved it,I'm done.
Speaker 3 (35:42):
Yay, yay.
And I think sometimes,Francoise, you would discount
you would, I don't know, youwould sometimes discount all
your years of experience in theindustry despite not having the
engineering degrees or the youknow real life experience as an
engineer, where yeah, you doreally learn a lot by talking to
people, interviewing them,writing about the stuff.
(36:04):
And you learn it, yeah, yousaid a little bit about a lot of
things.
Speaker 1 (36:08):
I often feel the same way.
We've talked about yourchapters, but we haven't talked
about the book itself.
In all of your chapters, youall talk about the importance of
communication um inengineering.
Can you tell a little bit aboutthat?
Speaker 2 (36:23):
I had a PhD advisor who trained us all how to give
presentations.
I mean, to the point whereinadvertently also trained us
how to give feedback on theirpresentations.
I have training on it becauseI'm passionate about it and I
know a lot about it.
And when I prepare apresentation, I feel like I'm
preparing for an Olympic event.
Like I really put a lot ofeffort, not in just the
(36:44):
practicing, but really thinkingabout what I want them to do
after the presentation.
I think also I'm an engineerwho liked writing her status
reports because my belief isengineers are paid for thinking
and writing is a reflectiveprocess.
I mean, you can get so caughtup in doing I need to do, do,
(37:06):
do, do, that you don't take timeto reflect.
And pausing and writing up justwhat you're doing creates such
value.
I would probably spend fivepercent of my time writing my
status report.
People are like, whoa, that's alot.
Like, nope, not if you thinkabout in percentage of what I'm
doing.
(37:26):
That doesn't seem like a lot tome since I spend a hundred
percent of my No, but when you'dsay, but I do that, they would
say you're spend four hourswriting your status report.
It's like, that's four hoursout of 80, 100 hours of work,
right?
It's really not that, right?
It's like that's a that's asmall pause.
So that's part of my belief andwhat those skills are so
(37:48):
useful.
Speaker 3 (37:50):
Yeah, so I mentioned being like the engineer who
would write, and that that issomewhat unusual.
And having edited a lot ofstuff that comes in from
engineers and scientists,there's a lot of them that you
realize, okay, they're reallysmart, but they don't do this.
And some of them, I think, justbelieve that they're not good
at writing, they can'tcommunicate that way.
Uh, you get them to try to do apresentation and they give you
(38:13):
a slide with I don't know howmany pieces of graphs and data,
and nobody can even make senseof it.
And so there's a greatopportunity to put more training
in and have that even early on.
And if they didn't get that incollege, you know, help people
understand in their careers thatif you can't explain what
(38:35):
you're doing in ways that yourcolleagues or the executives or
the person who has to sell thestuff can understand, it's gonna
be a real block.
And so we don't need to be thestereotype of the engineer who's
(38:55):
alone in their lab or on theircomputer and can't communicate
with anybody.
And having more women in thefield, I think, helps with that.
The men can learn it too.
Speaker 4 (39:05):
That's interesting.
Um, and I wish I would have hadAnn's class before I left MIT
because I had a big failure,right?
So a few years after startingwork, I was asked to give a
presentation at the TeradineUser Group conference.
And I was like, okay, sure, howhard could it be?
Man, was I wrong, right?
(39:27):
Everyone's like, no, don'tworry, it's 20 minutes, 10
slides, you'll be fine.
I practice a couple of times.
Uh, the day of thepresentation, I went up there
and I'm a Latina, I naturallyspeak fast.
And that day, I had a 20-minutepresentation went to N5.
And I was so utterlyembarrassed.
(39:49):
I was like really embarrassed.
I hid away for a little bit,but my boss came and found me.
He said, Nitza, we will we willfix this.
Don't worry, we will fix this.
And so we we, you know, once Icalmed down, we talked about
different strategies of how bestI could be a better presenter,
a better speaker.
And it was always talk in ourgroup meetings.
(40:11):
Um, be sure to talk at leastonce in any meeting I attended.
But then most importantly, talkto random strangers.
While ordering my morningcoffee, uh, I would make sorts
of all sorts of stories.
And when I was in Boston, therewas a Dunkin' Donuts on every
corner.
So that became my little ritualbefore going to work is go and
(40:32):
tell the story.
And that just made me feel morecomfortable.
Uh, the crazy thing, like 10years later, I had an engineer
who couldn't do uh a five-minutepresentation, and so I was
like, hmm, I need to dosomething about this.
And then a year later, my teamwas presenting at a conference,
and the two gentlemen, not maleor famous gentlemen, turned
(40:55):
their back to the audience and Iwas like, I really need to do
something about this.
And so I went and embarked on atwo-year journey with my team
to get them to a higher level ofcommunication.
And we started small, right?
Five minutes, just who you areas an individual, and then talk
about anything you'd like, andthen you know, what you're
doing, working on, and you know,we escalated the amount of time
(41:18):
they did this.
And it helped both uh, youknow, the men and the women in
my team just feel more confidentin themselves, being able to
communicate in meetings when itdidn't matter of whether or not
you're presenting something,just having a conversation,
asking questions, and thenpresenting anywhere from 20
(41:40):
minutes to an hour to 90minutes, and they all do well
now.
And so I really love that Ifailed because it put me on this
path and on this journey tohelp others be better at
communicating.
Uh, but it really sucked thatday, let me tell you.
It was really pretty bad.
Speaker 1 (41:57):
I love that story.
Can you each just summarize onereason why you think people
should read this book, women ormen?
Speaker 2 (42:06):
Because over 30 years ago, there was a book published
called Journeys of Women inScience and Engineering, No
Universal Contents.
I know for three of theeditors, they basically went
around and asked all these womenscientists and engineers these
questions.
And so they're kind of littlebiochapters.
But a lot of these women arereally famous.
Vera Rubin, the astronomer, andbut what I like about this
(42:28):
book, these are more, we aremore ordinary women.
We're like, we're we're nevergonna get the Nobel Prize or a
prize on that, but we're doingwork.
And I think there's value inhaving role models who are like
seem like more like regularpeople.
Like they're not, you know,we're not like this big, you
know, uh famous person in ourfield or anything like that.
(42:49):
And so I think that's the valuein the book is hearing people's
career paths, women's careerpaths, who, you know, um are
just regular engineers orscientists.
Speaker 1 (43:02):
People can identify with that more.
Yeah, that they could actuallydo it.
Speaker 3 (43:09):
There are a lot of diverse perspectives within the
broad women in STEM umbrella.
And it's not there's just onepath you need to follow.
And so I would say, especiallyfor well, for young women
thinking about their careers,there's like, oh, here's some
examples of women who have donethis.
Uh for maybe readers who are alittle bit older or maybe
(43:35):
thinking of a career change.
Here's again, also examples.
And even for, say, the youngmen to say, there's some really
smart women out there, andthey're gonna be your
colleagues, and they theirvoices deserve to be heard.
Speaker 4 (43:55):
Actually, it's funny.
Ann had sent me a messagesaying, Hey, I think you should
be a part of this.
And I was like, Why should Iwrite my story?
Why me?
And you you have to go througha little bit of self-reflection,
and then I start thinkingabout, well, I have a lot of
godchildren, I have a lot ofkids that I've spoiled, and I
(44:18):
want to be an example for them.
I want them to be able to say,my Nina, my tia, uh, she did
something else, right?
She's an engineer, she does allsorts of science-y stuff, but
she also wrote a chapter in abook that I can point to, that I
can hand off to somebody else.
Uh, and I wanted to, you know,be that person that somebody's
(44:40):
reading about.
And then they're like, oh, youknow, that Nietzsche, she did
something cool.
I want to do something likeher.
And so it was an interestingkind of journey to go on.
And it was it all started witha simple invitation for man, and
and then going through thiswhole journey.
Uh, so it it's nice to holdthat physical book in your hand
(45:02):
and then hand it to someone elseand say, This is my story.
And then they start to readabout it.
They read start, maybe startwith your story, but then they
go to Julia's and then they goto Ann's and then to other women
within the book, and thensaying, just like Julia was
mentioning, everybody doesthings a little differently.
So I don't have to go in astraight line to get from point
(45:22):
A to point B.
I can go in as many directionsas I like, and I can end up
where I'd like to end up.
So I think that's why I I likebeing part of this book.
Speaker 1 (45:34):
I like the fact that it covers all different
opportunities in STEM because Ithink sometimes there's a
disconnect between what youstudy in college and university
or even high school and how youcan put that to work as a job to
earn a living, doing somethingthat you're passionate about.
Because when you do somethingthat you're passionate about, it
feels less like work, right?
(45:55):
So I want to thank all of youfor joining me today.
I want to direct listeners toif you want to learn more about
this book, you can go tostrategic reliability
solutions.com slash empoweringwomen in STEM pioneering paths
to shape the future.
And we'll also be putting linksin the show notes for where you
(46:17):
can learn more, where you canbuy the book, um, and to any of
these websites that um peoplewant to go.
Thanks everybody.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Hey everyone.
Only three more episodes to gofor season five of the 3D
Insights podcast.
Next week, we bring you thelast in a series of episodes
(46:40):
from Nordson Test and Inspectionrecorded live at
Producttronica.
Our final two episodes will bein celebration of the 50th
anniversary of Semicon Europa.
The first features an interviewwith Semi-Europe's Leif
Altimime, Luke Vandenhoop ofIMEC, and Christian Koitsch of
ESMC.
And our farewell episode willfeature conversations with our
member companies and willdiscuss the future of advanced
(47:02):
packaging in Europe.
There's lots more to come, sotune in next time to the 3D
Insights podcast.
The 3D Insights podcast is aproduction of 3D Insights LLC.
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