Isaura Gaeta is here. She is the VP and GM of security Research at Intel Corporation. ISA leads an engineering team focused on hardware security research and physical attack mechanisms. Working closely with academia in this field.She's a 38 year veteran of Intel and spent the first two decades of her intel career developing various semiconductor processing technologies. Her work during that period actually led to two patents and five Intel Achievement awards. This is the company's highest recognition.

So I say I founded also Intel's Network of Executive Women for the Latin American region has been chair of Intel's Hispanic Leadership Council and the number of other awards go on. I'll tell you a few more. So top 100 Latina leaders in technology by high tech featured in 2021 leading Latinas by Hispanic executive magazine and name 2018 top Latino leader by the National Diversity Council. And she is here to share her session on a Latina's perspective on why diversity matters in tech.

And so so excited to welcome her to the stage is said, you're

a welcome. Thank you very much and good morning. Good afternoon, good evening. Wherever you're joining. From, I'm really excited to be here to speak to you today. Share my perspective on why a Latina perspective really matters in tech. But in order to do so, let's start at the beginning and I'll start from my childhood. I am the child of immigrants to the United States and they instilled in me the value of hard work. My father actually worked as a migrant farm worker in the field in California. And so the importance of showing up doing your best, helping to deliver for your family was very important role modeling that I got to observe. And later he actually transitioned to become a machinist.

And the blue collar work also showed that uh power and value of hard work. But my family instilled in me the importance of education in order to break away from the hard work and move into more technical areas. And so they really recommended, you know, prepare yourself in school, go as high as you can. That was not a very hard sell for me because being new to speaking English, I didn't learn how to speak English until I was five. Even though I was born in the United States, I gravitated toward math because it just made sense. It didn't matter that I was still learning English math just made a lot of sense to me and I was lost in loving numbers. And through math, the bridge to science was formed. And here in science, I really loved uh approaching it from the curiosity perspective of why things work the way they do and what happens if you do this? And so I gravitated toward courses in math and science and I was wondering, what can I do in this field? You know, what do I become a math or science teacher or what can I do until I learned about engineering? And then I set my goals on trying to get into college and to study engineering.

But being first generation and what I mean by that, the first generation in my family to attend college, I didn't have a lot of people in my family to ask, how do you apply to college? How do you apply to scholarships? What should I study? How do I study? So a lot of that I had to figure out on my own or, you know, once I started college with other first generation colleagues who we kind of shared best practices and learned along the way, but it was a little bit challenging because I didn't have a lot of people to talk to, to get their experience from.

So I plugged along and received my bachelor's and my master's in electrical engineering from Stanford University. And so I graduated and I was feeling super ready to contribute, right? I knew my stuff. I had studied um design, semiconductor design and semiconductor processing.

And, you know, I'm starting to interview with companies and I'm just feeling super enthused. And I was expecting uh environment where it would be very collegial and uh lots of diversity of gender. But instead, I observed a working group like this where when I entered into this working group, I felt like the only I felt like do I really belong in this group? You know, they, they all seem to be getting along and, and you know, understand each other's perspective and I was coming in feeling like the other post COVID, it would look more like this, right? You have the the faces on the screen and most of those faces were male. So I was really wondering how do I get my ideas heard? Because it was very common. When I first started, I would make a suggestion about approaching an experiment in a certain way or trying something and crickets, nobody would respond. I would come up with an idea. Nothing would happen. Maybe a few minutes later in the conversation, one of my male colleagues would make the same suggestion and suddenly everybody is like, oh yeah, that's great. Let's do it that way. And so I thought, wow, why am I not being heard? You know, do they even care?

Do I even belong in this environment? And then I started doubting myself. But along the way, there were some ideas and things that I experienced that were very unique and I wasn't hearing anybody talk about them. So let me share one of these examples, I'm sharing a picture of a semiconductor wafer and you could see on there some rectangles and these are individual dye. These are actually at the end of the process, when these dye get separated and put into a package, those are components that can be sold. So when I first started working in this field, more than 30 years ago, the dimensions, the X and Y dimensions of this rectangle had to be whole integers, whole numbers. That was a requirement in the design. And it felt kind of odd to me, you know, growing up in math and you know, the decimal points, it seemed like why are these restricted to whole integers? So I started asking about this. And what I was told is, well, the spec specifies that you need to have whole numbers again. Why, you know, keep asking why.

Um And as I dove in deeper and really got to the, the core reason why it turned out that the Wafer saw operation where they take these wafers and dice them up, the, the Wafer saw cuts through that operation was done overseas. Now, most of the technicians did not have college degrees. The engineers who designed the spec were concerned that if they add a decimal point that the technicians may set up the equipment incorrectly. And when they did the Wafer saw, they would cut through the active dye and ruin it. And so from my perspective, knowing how I grew up and my parents did not get to go to college, but they were very smart. And you explain why things happen a certain way you teach you, you people learn. So I said, why don't we teach the technicians about the decimal point? So I set up a short training curricula. We went overseas, we trained the Wafer saw technicians about the decimal point changed.

The spec implemented that change. And in the first year of operation with this new spec, my company realized $100 million of increased revenue because we were able to pack more dye onto a wafer. Once we eliminated this whole number uh requirement, you know, you could tape out two thousands of a mil at that point. Um And so again, just one person speaking up and asking why and from the perspective of we can teach people to do this um led to a lot of uh new revenue and cost opportunity for a company. So I call that the power of diversity. There were several realizations that I learned probably in my 1st 10 years in the industry. The first one is that my unique experience helps me see opportunities that others may not see as the example that I just showed you the background that I have um being female, being um in the United States or you know, having a background that um my cultural background, all of these present different situations that may help me to approach problems differently.

The other thing I realized is that people can't read your mind, you know, when I wasn't getting my voice heard and I was sort of shutting down, I would think, well, people will notice that I'm not contributing and, and maybe fish out of me. What am I thinking? No, no, that didn't happen. People can't read your mind. I also realized, you know, if it's not me, then who, who's going to speak up and ask this question or, you know, point out this issue that we're, that, that I see. The other realization is that it gets easier to speak up over time the first few times, maybe we're frustrating when it seemed like people weren't listening or wasn't getting my point across. But over time and as my confidence built up, it was easier, easier to try to um make sure that my point was being heard. So I realized my voice matters, your voice matters, the diversity of thought and experience that you bring, helps lead to more complete solutions. And this is increasingly true in technology. As we're creating technology that is helping people all over the world, it's important to make sure those perspectives from people all over the world are included in the design so that these products are really in service of all of us.

You know, as we're looking at new A I applications, it's really important that we design the A I to be inclusive of a broad variety of people and perspectives to make sure those solutions are truly representative of all people. The other realization was that you may have more allies than you think. Even though in many cases, I was the only woman in the work group. When I spoke up, I would have other people come to me and say, oh, I was thinking the same thing, but I wasn't sure. And I'm so glad you brought it up or if I was making a proposal, other people would back me up. And so allies could be coming from anywhere. And you know, once you share your ideas, you'll find that there are probably more allies than you think are out there. Some other realizations that I experienced along the way, the importance of building a really strong support network, the network can be inside your organization, inside your work group and business unit could be just within your company. It could be through other professional groups that you belong to like SW or um in my case, Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers.

But that network can uh give you feedback, help you uh build and retain that confidence that, that you've earned through the studies and the work that you've achieved. The other thing I've learned is to take on those tough challenges, raise your hand and volunteer for some of those tough technical challenges. Not only does this lead to great learning, but also some of these great challenges if they get solved for the company. It could lead to great recognition. And as was mentioned, um during my introduction, I've taken on, you know, some of the problems where people are running away from the problem because it looks too tough. I jump in and in those cases where we were able to solve those problems. Um It's led to some really nice awards and promotional opportunities because you get to be known for someone that is not afraid to take on tough challenges to do that. Sometimes you need to reframe failure. So don't think of the word failure as failure, think of it as learning. So if something didn't work out, there was good learning in there, you take that learning and you move forward, so you're either successful or you're learning, just get rid of that word failure.

Also, I learned that it's important to be generous, be generous with your time, mentor, others give back, bring other people along, sponsor people back people up, especially for other women in your field. The more you do it, the more you actually get back. But this is something that is really important because some of us that have been in these fields for 3040 years, we didn't have a lot of people that look like us that thought like us. And now that there's more of us, the more that we band together and help each other, the more we can all be successful and be fearless sometimes that means just showing up. Sometimes when you're thinking it's so difficult speaking up. Will anyone hear me? Does anyone really care?

Showing up speaking up? That takes a lot of courage that's showing fearlessness. And it really does make a difference in the long run that you do it. So the strategy that I've adopted, if I had a little acronym to share with you being in the computer industry, you think of CPU central processing unit? Well, I hijacked that acronym and I use it to mean commit, persist and unite and let me describe what I mean by that. So first of all, commit, commit to be your best self every day when you show up, try your best, put your best foot forward, persist, persist despite setbacks because there will be setbacks, just keep going and unite, unite because you can't do it alone. Your network is actually quite powerful and will help you and we can all do this together. So CPU and with that, I wanna thank you for your attention and if there's time I'd be very happy to take any questions. Hi. Thank

you so much for that. How are you feeling after sharing your story here with all of

us? Yeah, I'm very happy, very happy to share this story. And hopefully if there's anybody that uh um aligns with some of the messages that I've given, I would be really happy to connect with you offline.

Yeah, and I think certainly that's the case today as we are so tight between our talks because we love to just, we love to hear all that passionate and sometimes we run out of time like we have here right now. But thank you so much for joining us here today. It's clear that you're passionate about what you do and about lifting up and, and bringing more diversity in tech. And so we thank you for sharing that here with us today.

Been my pleasure. Good luck. And thank you, everyone. Thank you.