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Based on an interview with Françoise Chombar
About 15 years ago, Françoise Chombar, then chief executive officer of Belgian semiconductor company Melexis, was wrestling with a challenge that is universal in the technology sector—the shortage of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) talent and diversity.
“I wondered why it was so hard, why so few chose a STEM education or career,” she remembers. Perhaps even more troubling for Chombar was the impact this had on her company’s ability to innovate: “The more diverse your teams are, the better the innovation and quality that comes out of those teams. Without diversity, you lose that.”
Researching the root causes, she discovered the World Economic Forum’s 2007 Global Gender Gap Report,[1] which found that despite equal access to education and healthcare for women and men in most developed countries, economic participation of women was significantly lower than that of men.
Chombar says, “That’s when I realized that if we wanted to create a more robust STEM talent pool and raise the economic participation rate of women, we would have to convince more youngsters—and definitely more girls—to choose a STEM education.”
At that moment, she set a goal to focus her leadership and influence on increasing interest in STEM education and careers among children, especially girls.
Françoise Chombar is Chairwoman and co-founder of Melexis. She served as CEO of Melexis for 18 years (from 2003 to 2021). She is currently a boardmember of Umicore, Soitec, Smart Photonics, Antwerp Management School and Mediafin. She is also president of the STEM platform, an advisory board to the Flemish government, aiming to encourage young people to pursue a Science, Technology, Engineering, or Mathematics education.
As Chombar explored ways to accomplish her goal, she was appointed by the Flemish government to lead its STEM Platform[2]—an independent group that would advise the government’s STEM Steering Committee—and network with similar groups in other countries via the European Union’s STEM Coalition.
She also began leveraging her positions in industry associations, such as SEMI[3] with the European Chips Skills Academy,[4] and more recently the Global Semiconductor Alliance,[5] to raise awareness about STEM opportunities, particularly among women and girls.
Chombar embraced these responsibilities and soon began to uncover the causes behind the disparities she saw. “Kids were unable to connect STEM disciplines to real-world applications, so it was boring for them,” she says. “For girls, the understanding was that STEM wasn’t for them. Boys were taught that STEM was for men. And many teachers held an unconscious bias that reinforced this stereotype. So, I knew our approach had to focus on transforming these stereotypes at the school level.”
This epiphany provided Chombar with a direction to start driving greater STEM interest among students.
Chombar first began advocating for the use of an integrated STEM model. Instead of approaching STEM as individual disciplines (i.e., physics, math, or engineering), students would leverage multiple disciplines to generate solutions to real-world challenges; for example, issues of energy conservation or clean water.
Based on this guidance, the Flemish government started STEM academies in every municipality, providing students with weekly integrated experiences. Moreover, in Belgium’s lower-income municipalities, Chombar started to support Saturday STEM programs in which students from underserved communities were exposed not just to the integrated STEM model but also to STEM professionals and technology companies.
Saturday school presentations from STEM leaders were a critical part of Chombar’s efforts. “We found that they were most effective when kids could see themselves and different types of jobs represented in those visitors,” she says. “So, we urged companies to send employees who represented different backgrounds, genders, and occupations—not only the academic engineer and the researcher but also the technician maintaining the equipment. Ideally, presenters would be 50/50 women and men.”
As a result of Chombar and her colleagues’ work, STEM interest increased significantly among schoolchildren: “When we showed them how they could use STEM to solve real-world problems—for instance, helping a paraplegic walk again or reversing their grandmother’s Parkinson’s disease—they were no longer bored. They were excited to learn more.”
The Saturday schools in underserved communities revealed new futures for students and their families. “By bringing these kids and their parents in contact with engineers and technology companies for the first time, their expectations completely changed,” says Chombar. “Almost all of them have stayed in school, pursued education beyond high school, and improved the lives of their families and their community.”
The change in male students’ attitudes toward their female counterparts was also remarkable. “In the beginning, many boys felt STEM was not for girls,” explains Chombar. “By the end, the boys felt that STEM was definitely for girls.”
Girls’ perceptions of their own place in STEM were similarly transformed by the class presentations. “In the beginning, girls liked STEM but were ambivalent,” she says. “As we brought passionate female technicians and researchers into the classroom to talk for 15 minutes about their jobs and contributions to society, girls’ confidence levels jumped by several percentage points. By the end, the girls were surprised at how much they enjoyed STEM and planned to seek more STEM education.”
Today, Chombar’s efforts to raise STEM interest among youth continue to enrich her region and her country.
To those interested in joining the effort, Chombar recommends, “Reach out. If you’re a school, reach out to companies in your region and find a match. If you’re a company, reach out to a school, go into classrooms with all kinds of different profiles represented, and talk passionately about the job that you’re doing.”
She concludes, “You might think you’re just influencing a six- or seven-year-old, but these kids come home and talk to their parents passionately about that engineer, and those parents get interested too. It might take 15 to 20 years before you can hire them, but you will have made a huge difference over the longer term.”
Mouser Electronics is an industry leader in supporting educational initiatives that inspire and engage students in STEM-related projects and programs. Through its unwavering support of education, particularly at the secondary and postsecondary levels, Mouser strives to motivate, inspire, and encourage new generations of engineers and scientists to lead us forward.
Sources
[1] https://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_GenderGap_Report_2007.pdf [2] https://www.stemcoalition.eu/members/flemish-stem-platform [3] https://www.semi.org/en [4] https://chipsacademy.eu/ [5] https://www.gsaglobal.org/
Mouser Electronics, founded in 1964, is a globally authorized distributor of semiconductors and electronic components for over 1,200 industry-leading manufacturer brands. This year marks the company's 60th anniversary. We specialize in the rapid introduction of the newest products and technologies targeting the design engineer and buyer communities. Mouser has 28 offices located around the globe. We conduct business in 23 different languages and 34 currencies. Our global distribution center is equipped with state-of-the-art wireless warehouse management systems that enable us to process orders 24/7, and deliver nearly perfect pick-and-ship operations.
