STEM holds the potential for a fairer future

The Marie R Pistilli Award honours an individual who has contributed to advancing the profile of women in electronic design automation (EDA) or creating opportunities for women in the industry. Some recipients have been leaders within a company while others have been a mentor or a role model. The annual award is presented at the Design Automation Conference (DAC) – the annual exhibition and conference for EDA – and this year’s recipient was Renu Mehra, R&D group director for the Digital Design group at Synopsys.

Mehra heads the design compiler R&D team and provided one of the early visions for automated power management. She is one of the founding members of the IEEE 1801 working group that created the power intent specification, the Unified Power Format.

Marie Pistilli, who died in 2015, was the co-founder of DAC. “Marie had the foresight to honour those who have made tremendous contributions to the electronic industry and we continue to honour those who share in her passion for the electronics industry in an effort to make our industry a place where diversity can thrive,” says Michelle Clancy, DAC publicity and marketing chair.

The role of mentors

Mehra’s father was her first mentor. She grew up in Jamshedpur, India, and remembers discussions with her father, a mechanical engineer. She never thought that mechanical engineering is not a woman’s profession. “We used to have discussions and the only subject he was really interested in, when you could engage him, was physic or maths. You felt, OK, this is something I can go to my dad and talk about and get some really good insights.

“I went to the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur. I have talked to my girlfriends there and they said they had to fight with parents to be able to go to an engineering school because they said that’s not what girls do,” she recalls.

When she was an undergraduate at the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur [from 1987], there were no female professors in the electrical engineering department. The student population of eight women to 300 men was somewhat intimidating, she says, but she feels it trained her to deal with a workplace that is pre-dominantly male. The male students had their own undergraduate dorm rooms, but there were not enough girls to fill a dorm room, remembers Mehra. Female undergraduates, masters and PhD students all shared accommodation in one building.

“It’s a very different experience, but somehow it taught me different things and how to deal with it. And I actually do not feel so intimidated. I think that was some kind of a training exercise,” she says.

As a postgraduate student in Berkeley, California, (she studied for an MS and PhD in electrical engineering and computer sciences), she met a second, significant mentor, Professor Jan Rabaey, who she describes as a visionary.

“He has been a pioneer in his field and he had a way of looking at the world, which was much, much broader than what we were doing,” she recalls.

One project in the early 1990s was a tablet that would have voice and handwriting recognition, before the advent of the Newton and Apple’s iPad. Working in partnership with Stanford University, the project involved the mechanical engineering department, the computer science department and the design group, with the EDA team working on low power synthesis and estimation. This project helped cement her belief that engineering has the potential to change how we help society and make it much more inclusive.

“STEM is really the way of the future. If you look at how computer science is exploding, it’s not just technology, it’s not just designing hardware and designing chips or designing an algorithm for self-driving cars. It’s everything – it’s going to be pervasive,” she continues. STEM can be applied to many career fields, she argues.

“If you are interested in the medical field, there is a lot it can do in medicine, also with computer science… If you have interests, for example, social justice, there are things that we can do with software – make software more just, help people with disabilities… If you are interested in fashion, there’s a lot you can still do with computer science… Even if you’re doing marketing, everybody is using some kind of STEM in marketing. In the film industry, there is digitising, rendering images and other projects.” The aim is to emphasise to the next generation how broad the impact of STEM is and how they can follow any passion that they have, she adds.

Putting STEM in context

Mehra shared a video of a DAC talk by Maja Matarić [Distinguished Professor of Computer Science, Neuroscience and Pediatrics at USC – University of Southern California] about building robots to help people recovering from illness, with her high school student daughter. Her daughter was so interested that she applied, and was accepted, for an internship at the Viterbi Lab in USC.

“She was doing a research project on what are the things that socially assistive robots can do and understand the issues faced by middle schoolers. She realised how she can leverage in technology to help what she wants to further and it inspired her to go into the STEM field.

“She’s really interested in social assistive robots right now and looking at how AI can help, how machine learning can help in trying to really help society in general,” says Mehra. “Her ultimate career may not be chip design but STEM has become one of the enablers for her goal.”

Not many 16- to 18-year-olds know exactly what they want to do for the rest of their lives when making their exam choices, which is one reason Mehra is passionate about visibility into what career paths are possible via STEM or computer science. She joined a diversity panel session at her daughter’s high school, speaking about the paths taken to different careers. She is pleased that schools are introducing extracurricular projects, such as robotics programmes, which help students understand and gain hands-on experience of future career choices.

Encouraging girls

Mehra believes companies also have a role in encouraging students to take the engineering career path. Many invite students for hackathons and she admires the work done by Girls Who Code.

Working hard on school assignment

She has been a judge at the Synopsys Science Fair, which has one award for women. “That acknowledges the fact that the atmosphere may not be as conducive for women so they need to be acknowledged and encouraged.” She has been pleased to see a lot of girls taking part in the Science Fair.

Diversity is important to ensure a fair society, which uses technology and tomorrow has more opportunities to build on the work of previous generations. “The next generation of devices is going to be smart at everything. They are going to be thinking, they are going to be making decisions for us. We want all these decisions to be equitable, right? We want them to not be biased. And we want them to always work, not fail when you can’t recognise a face you’re not used to. So we need these machines – in transportation, in smart cities, in smart homes, even in growing food – to be made by people who are diverse, so that they take care of the whole world,” she implores.

Support structures

During Mehra’s long course, some postgraduates had children, with many dropping out of the programme because they wanted to start families, says Mehra. She remembers the Women in Computer Science and Engineering organisation which, 25 years later, is still thriving at Berekley, says Mehra. It was run by Sheila Humphrey, who was recognised for her work at a ceremony at the White House.

“We did have a support structure, and an awareness that having a smaller circle of women, created a space to face different challenges. We knew we needed to do something more, bring them together, provide a platform where they can interact.

“We are facing issues that are different from what the guys face. So creating some place to talk about it and to get together was important. We used to hold technical talks, but we used to also have lunch meetings where we would talk about other things that we are facing,” Mehra recalls.

On receiving the Marie R Pistilli Award in San Francisco, Mehra says: “Engineering and technology have been my passion for as long as I can remember. I enjoy sharing this passion with other women and team members because it gives me an opportunity to listen to diverse perspectives, explore, be innovative and strive for excellence.”