This video appeared inMicrowaves & RFand has been published here with permission.
This video is in the科学与工程女性（明智）andTechXchange Talkstopics within ourTechXchange Library
雪利酒·赫斯（Sherry Hess）IEEE MTT-S的微波炉女性(WIM) subcommittee and product marketing group director atCadence，谈论她在行业中的生活以及WIM所做的工作，以提高女性RF/微波工程师的概况。
Interview transcript:
MWRF：欢迎使用Microwaves和RF TechXchange Talks的另一版。近年来，讨论的主题之一是围绕工程学科的多样性。今天，我们想谈论妇女参与工程学的参与。
我今天的客人是Cadence Design Systems产品营销小组总监Sherry Hess。欢迎，雪利酒。
Sherry Hess: Thank you.
MWRF：雪利酒已经在EDA行业工作了很长时间；通常，您的职业生涯一直在电磁模拟中。我们已经认识了20年，可以追溯到2000年代初。我们曾经在DAC见面。那些日子里你和ansoft在一起。
除了您在Cadence的营销角色外，您还是IEEE MTT-S的微波（WIM）小组委员会的女性主席。我想了解您的性别和职业周围的一些主题。告诉我们有关您自己一开始的信息：是什么吸引了您进入科学和工程学，无论是作为学术追求还是职业？我知道你去了卡内基·梅隆大学。
Sherry Hess: Correct. Let me share a little bit about myself and my trajectory. Like many of the people out there listening, when we were in middle school in high school, I had a real propensity for math and sciences.
我告诉我的孩子，有一天，我想成为一名数学教授。我喜欢拼图，无论是物理难题还是数学难题。您知道您将因为对数学的热爱而成为工程师，科学家或某些东西。
像其他许多人一样，您有一个影响力圈子。我父亲在Westinghouse担任核工程师，因此我在Westinghouse的大学初期在大学的早期实习，从事真正的工程。我参加了很多数学课，然后参加了工程学。当您擅长数学和科学时，这似乎就是您的发展方式。
卡内基梅隆大学是在我的后院,因为我做了up in the Pittsburgh area. I fell in love with, of all things, electromagnetic and electromechanical engineering. I like solving those equations and seeing field lines come to life and make these invisible phenomena visible in a way. That all piqued my interest, and when I graduated, I did a quick stint at Intel.
I have to say what attracted me to Intel, I think, was that it was one of the few companies I interviewed with where I interviewed with another female. I don't know if it was conscious at the time or not, but it probably made a difference. So when I was hired, there were a few other women in the program.
But with my love for electromagnetics and startups and being extroverted as well as introverted in terms of engineering discipline, I navigated to a startup at the time, which was Ansoft and that's where our paths crossed at those DACs. I've bounced in and out of EDA, whether it's been on the electromagnetic side or the microwave/RF side. Now, within Cadence it's come full circle. I have on my product team electromagnetic, thermal, signal integrity, and power integrity. These are all areas in which I've developed expertise over the years, so it's kind of come full circle, yeah.
MWRF：在像卡内基·梅隆（Carnegie Mellon）这样著名的技术学校中，作为一名女性，然后与所有这些不同的业务一起行业？有Intel和Ansoft和Applied Wave Research，它们被吸收到NI中，然后进入节奏。作为一个女人，你是什么感觉？
Sherry Hess: it's a great question and it ties into my passion for being active within WIM and MTT-S when I was younger and just starting my career. Now, as my career has moved forward, I can look back a little bit and maybe understand why I made some decisions that I made. I mentioned going to Intel at first, because I think I had four or five job offers. I ended up going with Intel, I think, largely because I saw other females, other people like me.
因此，有点不知不觉地，我去Ansoft时做出了决定。我是20岁的员工，也是第一个技术性的女性雇用。但这是一家创业公司，所以它非常像一个家庭，我已经习惯了很多女人的大学，所以您只是卷起袖子，而您就是自己，您的状况良好，您做得很好。
几年后，我开始参与IEEE，然后我去了，“哇！”像我这样的其他女人，我能够建立这种联系，因为在一家只有20个人的初创公司中，我没有任何类型的女性友情或指导，我可以问问题的人，所以IEEE充满了空白。
它发展成为该行业中其他女性的社区，我们可以反弹想法并发展个人和专业友谊。这两个世界就是这样，IEEE和我自己的职业道路。
MWRF：您是否必须面对任何挑战，您必须克服的障碍，这与成为女人有关吗？
Sherry Hess: I'll answer that with humor because I think, no matter who we are, we always have obstacles. I attended a trade show many years ago and I was giving the demos of the software product of the company I was with at the time. A gentleman came into the booth and spoke to my male colleague beside me, asking questions about the product, and said he’d like to see a demo. My colleague said, “Sherry can do the demo for you.” The gentleman was, like, “What?” He thought I was just there to greet and take names, and my colleague said, “Yeah, she's the smartest person in this booth.” It was nice for him to back me up, and so, then the conversation started.
我认为只是（以这种角色）并没有看到我们，因此很容易假设我们不在其中。
Recently I was sharing with somebody else that I was at a conference again, and it was a smaller conference, and they had the coffee in the middle of the room. I walk over for a refill, but the carafes were all empty. I was tipping them all over to see if any had anything left in it. A man saw me, came over, and said, “Oh, are you going to be refilling these for us?” I said, “I wasn’t planning on it, but if you want to carry them, I’m sure we can go figure out how to get into the kitchen.” I defused it with humor, but it goes back to how we women are just not commonly seen in such circumstances.
So, part of the effort we’re doing within the IEEE society is elevate the platform. You’re going to see us at conferences, you're going to see us on panels, you're going to see us giving a technical presentation. If you read any of the IEEE publications, we’re spotlighting a lot of the female authors, because I believe that when you select a course for your career, you want to see people like you already there. So, we’re trying to put a spotlight on (women).
Having more female engineers is really key, and also, to tie into something you said about diversity, I just finished a task force on diversity within the MTT-S society and going beyond the gender diversity of male and female, even within our female community we're looking at diversity of geography. We have people in North America, Europe, Asia, even South America now joining the committee. We have a combination of voices from where I come from within the industry, but we also have people that are in government as well as academia. A diversity of voices based on where your career is projecting from. Then, we’re also being mindful of—I don't want to say age—I’m going to say in terms of experience, we have a lot of young professionals that are just starting out and we have some people that have been in their careers for years and people that are even IEEE Fellows. There’s a lot of diversity we can bring.
MWRF: Tell me more about the WIM subcommittee and the work of that group, what the goals are, and where you see the future going for young women in our industry.
Sherry Hess: The WIM subcommittee has been around for at least two decades, if not longer. We want to build a community that attracts other women to join, connect, to make relationships both on a personal as well as professional level. Then, ideally, just scale up the number of women you're going to see in this engineering domain. It’s very complementary to Women in Engineering, which is at the highest level of IEEE, and then each society tends to have its own affinity group around women in engineering. Within the MTT-S society, we call it Women in Microwaves or WIM.
We have three pillars that we pursue. Historically, it's been events, so if you've been to an IMS or European Microwave Week, we have tried to do a networking event as well as some sort of technical program to pull women together to have conversations. These meetings also have at least 50% men. Many of the men will ask me, “Sherry, I have a wife or a daughter and I’d really like them to go into STEM. What can you say?”
And I just say, be an advocate for them, connect them with other women here and we can kind of coach them and guide them and let them see that they’re not crazy for choosing this as a career when I think our numbers are about 7%. We're not even double digits yet. So, it can feel a little bit lonely at times when you look around, but making that connection is key, so we’ve tried to do that at events.
The other thing that we’ve started doing more and more of using the power of the pen, which is something that I know you believe in. Within the IEEE Microwaves magazine, we make sure every month there's a Women in Microwaves column. We're doing a special focus issue; we actually have two where we're spotlighting a number of female authors. So, whether you see us at a live event or you're reading about us online, you're going to start hearing our voices.
我们正在做铁道部e webinars to ensure that when the IEEE society does a webinar, it's just not a full lineup of all male presenters. We actually have a number of female presenters. That’s part of our task force looking for gender diversity.
然后，我们正在旧的MTT.org网站上进行更多在线进行更多的网站，以试图宣布我们正在做的事情和各种活动，无论是现场活动还是虚拟，在会议小组中发表讲话的机会等等。只是试图让每个人都知道并欢迎他们参加对话。
Attempting to connect with the newer members is an effort we're doing, both through academia, with the student chapters, but also when they graduate there's a Young Professionals society. The female percentages in both of those are very encouraging, so we’ve got to make sure when we meet them, we’re mentoring those relationships. Mentoring is another aspect of what we do within WIM. We want to nurture that talent so that people stick and stay.
MWRF：非常感谢您，雪利酒，花点时间谈论它，我们期待将来就WIM进行更多对话。
Sherry Hess: And thank you!
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