The IT world that is increasingly concerned of gender inclusivity to uplift women as well as to fill the shortage of resources screams, “It makes business sense to encourage gender inclusivity.” But this doesn’t seem to be the case in the semiconductor industry. The Indian semiconductor industry is faced with demand-supply mismatch of talented engineering graduates who meet the very specialized sector requirements of this industry. While women may be making inroads into the semiconductor industry in recent years, they still hold relativeley few management positions. Recently, Zoom Info, a research agency conducted a survey on ‘Gender in the Executive Suite’. Of the thirteen industries analyzed, the semiconductor industry was found to have the lowest number of woman CEO’s, at a meager 3.1 percent. A similar trend prevails among other high-ranking positions also.

What holds the women back from entering an industry that is filled with a vast array of potential paths for ambitious engineers? Is it the lack of proper understanding of the industry or a lack of knowledge of the growth of the industry in the past decade among women? “In the semiconductor industry, keeping pace with the shrinking product cycle and design cycle due to the increasing complexity of the chip needs undivided attention and single-minded focus. Many women find it difficult to cope with an extremely demanding career here,” explains Veena Chakravarthy, Senior Manager of Centillium. Like the IT industry, the semiconductor industry should also concentrate on gender inclusivity to uplift women as well as to fill the shortage of resources.

In this issue, we present a few responsible women in the industry that dared to travel the road less traveled by women. We hope that their journey would ignite the young minds aspiring for a career here.

Carving a niche
Reshmi Rekha Mishra, Program Manager at Sasken with 11 years experience, got interested in Digital Signal Processing (DSP) when she was doing her masters in electronics from NIT, Rourkela. Subsequently she pursued her doctorate in artificial intelligence and its applications in DSP. Reshmi started her career as a lecturer in National Institute of Science and Technology, Orison, teaching embedded systems. But the quest for research and spirit of learning brought her to the industry. “I was always interested in research activities and innovating and experimenting on new things,” recalls Reshmi. With this background, Reshmi joined as a software engineer in the R&D team in the embedded division in Patni Computers. Here she developed the voice biometric system that made Patni the fifth company in the world to develop the system

She joined Sasken in 2002. She is responsible for the delivery management of ten projects in the embedded division. She is also the program manager for the multimedia codec division in the company. She urges the techies to plan their career in advance. “A career should be a matter of choice and not a matter of chance,” explains Reshmi.