The Women Who Made America’s Microchips and the Children Who Paid for It
February 25, 2025 at 07:30PMIn the ’70s and ’80s, factory workers in Silicon Valley’s booming semiconductor industry, many of them Hispanic and Asian women, were exposed to range of hazardous chemicals without proper protection. Several studies show that women who worked on assembly lines faced higher rates of miscarriages and birth defects in their children due to this exposure. For The Verge, Justine Calma speaks with a few of these workers, including Yvette Flores, who gave birth to a son with severe intellectual disabilities, and LeAnn Severson, who had a baby with microcephaly. By the ’90s, chip manufacturing eventually shifted to Asia, but as the US ramps up domestic production, stronger safety measures and greater transparency around chemical use in fabrication rooms must be in place to protect a new generation of workers. “The rush to develop more powerful chips for AI is raising the stakes,” Calma writes. Her reporting is essential reading amid the global AI arms race.
She wore a mask, one thin enough that she could still smell through it as she stirred and sprayed the green adhesive they called frit. She’d dump any unused chemicals down the sink in the small room she shared with one other worker cooking beryllium in an oven behind her. She could feel the blast of heat each time he opened the oven door.
“There was so much going on there,” Yvette recalls. “I had to walk out of there a lot of times because it got so stuffy.”
One day at work in 1978, Yvette began bleeding in the restroom of Spectra-Physics. The experience is mostly a blur to her today, but there are things she still distinctly remembers — the intense, painful cramping; another woman inside the restroom telling her she should go to the hospital; and finally, a doctor at the hospital telling her that she had had a miscarriage.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/02/25/the-women-who-made-americas-microchips-and-the-children-who-paid-for-it/
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