Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World Highlight

U.S. chip manufacturers kept pace with Japan by recruiting a global workforce of women. Firms offshored the vast majority of fabrication work to Mexico, South Korea, Singapore, Malaysia, and Thailand while filling local manufacturing roles with Vietnamese and Filipina women. Domestically, employers relied on the pseudoscience of racial difference: They believed Asian women were less likely to organize for higher wages than Chicanas, whom they feared were susceptible to the era’s revolutionary rhetoric. “Small, foreign, and female” is how one manager described the qualifications for semiconductor production jobs.