Chip companies like Nvidia and Intel are facing a major gender gap amid the AI boom

A woman works at a semiconductor plant in Yangxin county in east China’s Shandong province.

When a young engineering student attended her first recruitment fairs at the Colorado School of Mines, she initially felt discouraged as she tried to break into the semiconductor industry as a chemical engineer.

“It definitely feels like, oh, they’re only picking 10 women and 90 men, and therefore the 10 women they pick are going to be just that much more competitive,” said the student who asked not to be identified so she could speak freely, told B-17.

She went to work as a process engineer at an Intel chip fab in Arizona. Only three out of the 10 people on her team were women, she said. She often felt some of the best resources for the chip fab, like top construction workers, were dedicated to teams with more men, while women were given less leeway to make mistakes.

“We’re very isolated, very often in a resource sense,” she said.

This dynamic is not specific to one company; gender disparity is widespread throughout the tech industry. According to a 2023 Accenture analysis, the median representation of women in the semiconductor industry is between 20% and 29%, up from between 20% and 25% in 2022. Over half of companies reported less than 10% representation of women in technical director roles and less than 5% in technical executive leadership roles.

As the US is projected to triple its domestic chip manufacturing and generative AI could become a $1.3 trillion market by 2032, building an inclusive workforce will be critical to developing the technology and ensuring that the economic boom benefits as many people as it can.

Part of that is a challenge in the education pipeline. Although they make up the majority of undergraduate and advanced degrees, women make up less than 23% of engineering and computer science graduates. This percentage drops even more among minorities, as Black and Latina women comprised less than 4% of engineering graduates and 5% of computer science graduates over the past 10 years.

Recruiters for the chips industry said that closing the gap within hiring can sometimes be a sensitive topic as gender is a protected class in antidiscrimination laws. While the chip industry makes efforts to expand the recruiting pool in general so that hiring can be more inclusive, the changes can feel incremental.

According to the most recently published corporate social responsibility reports, about 20% of Nvidia’s total workforce are women. Women make up about 15% of technical roles, 18% of managers, and 40% of executive officers. AMD’s workforce is 24% women. About 19% of engineers, 14% of senior management, and 17% of the executive team are women. Women make up 28% of Intel’s workforce, and they hold 25% of technical roles and 19% of senior leadership. At Micron, 31% of its total global workforce is made up of women, and they hold 25% of technical roles, 17% of senior leadership roles, and 21% of leader roles.

“Intel has a long track record of fostering a diverse and inclusive culture, and it is core to our values,” an Intel spokesperson said in a statement.

Intel set goals to increase its female senior leadership representation to 25% and technical roles to 40% by 2030. The Intel spokesperson also pointed to its first registered apprenticeship program for manufacturing facility technicians for its Arizona fabs, of which all of the selected participants are women.

“We treat all employees with fairness and respect and don’t tolerate behavior that is contrary to those values,” the spokesperson added.

Both AMD and Nvidia have employee resource groups focused on women in tech. An Nvidia spokesperson declined to comment on this story. An AMD spokesperson said the number of female engineers and participants in their pipeline mentoring programs has increased in the last five years and that the company has collaborated with the Global Semiconductor Alliance to recruit female engineers at the University of Texas at Austin and MIT. Pipeline program participants also cited in a 2023 survey, an improvement in their perception of growth and development at the company. Micron did not respond to requests for comment at the time of publication.

Few women in leadership

One former Intel process engineer, who still works in the chips industry, said she decided to leave the company because she felt that it could be a “hostile environment” at times, with male engineers challenging her when they were not rewarded with projects. The engineer, whose identity is known to B-17, asked to remain anonymous because she’s not authorized to speak to the press.

“There were also other high-performing men on my team who were getting the same projects and same opportunities as me, but there were never any complaints made about them,” she said.

Although Intel made more efforts to hire women, she said she did not see as much effort in promotion. Out of hundreds of people in her department, only two managers were female, she said.

A lack of women in leadership can create the perception that female employees have no room to grow, resulting in a higher turnover rate.

“Attracting talent without a plan to retain the talent just really creates the same cyclical problem,” said Jared Tatham, a managing director at Insight Global who oversees its semiconductor recruitment portfolio.

Reducing bias in hiring

Clients have requested more gender diversity in the pipeline, said Luke Tomaszko, a managing principal consultant at Acceler8 Talent who works with early-stage hardware companies that focus on AI chip design. He said startups must be conscious of this as they build out the culture and makeup of their teams.

“The industry can be so male-dominated that if you have a team of 100 men, then it’s not really a welcoming environment for a woman to come in,” Tomaszko said.

Insight Global’s Tatham works with clients that range from material suppliers for equipment at foundries to companies that do chip design, testing, and packaging. He said he makes it a goal to reach out with calls more personally with potential candidates rather than just rely upon the job descriptions since men are more likely to apply for jobs even if they don’t meet all the criteria.

Tomaszko said that before posting job descriptions, his agency runs the listings through tools such as a gender decoder to review words that may have a gender-biased leaning.

Demanding schedules and childcare

The CHIPS and Science Act spurred some efforts to reduce childcare costs. Micron received $6.1 billion in funding this year, including for the construction of new childcare facilities in Idaho and New York. However, childcare is only one facet of improving the pipeline.

The schedule of a chip fab may also be a challenge. The former Intel process engineer said that the on-call schedule, which meant she would have to cover in case anything went wrong at the factory, was “definitely” something that made her think about how it would affect longer-term family planning.

“When you’re woken up multiple times during the night, and then you have to do your whole day the following day, I imagine that’d be particularly challenging for birthing mothers. You’d have to stay physically within two hours of the factory that entire week, just in case of any emergency,” she said.

Closing the gender gap in the chip industry will require more efforts from companies and top leadership to make these career paths more inclusive and stable. Some women say there have been some improvements in inclusivity and building community.

The former process engineer said that she now takes part in an all-women cohort at her company that has monthly meetings. In these meetings, they discuss podcasts and readings about leadership, and company veterans and newcomers alike can share different ideas.

“It’s not just like one person leading it. There are several different cohorts with different leaders, and it really just seems to be supported by our senior management,” she said.