Chips, Grit, and "Girl on Fire": Emily Yang on Leadership, Mentorship, and Moving Up

The semiconductor industry has a pipeline problem. Women enter the field, but somewhere between mid-management and the executive level, they disappear. Emily Yang knows this from experience, and she’s doing something about it.

In an industry where innovation is currency, Emily Yang has built a career on the belief that the best way to succeed is to lift others up. As Senior Vice President of Worldwide Sales and Marketing at Diodes Incorporated, she's not only driven transformative growth, but also championed mentorship and community impact, embodying perfectly this year's International Women's Day theme: give to gain.

Emily discusses what effective leadership actually looks like across cultures. She explains how Diodes transformed from a discrete component supplier into a solutions-led organisation, why humanoid robotics is the emerging application she’s most excited about, and why geopolitical supply chain disruption is the challenge the industry isn’t talking about loudly enough. She also makes the case for mentorship as a structural fix, not a feel-good programme.

#IWD2026 #GiveToGain #Leadership #Semiconductors #STEM #Mentorship #WeTalkIoT

Summary of this week’s episode:

Emily’s career path: from customer service rep to SVP

How leadership style evolves when you’ve been on every rung

Transforming Diodes: from component sales to solution selling

Executive presence and communicating vision to a global team

Leadership philosophy: trust, advocacy, and the carrot approach

Diodes’ technology portfolio: MOSFETs, signal integrity, PCIe Gen 6

Humanoid robotics: the emerging application worth watching

Leading across cultures: what employee survey scores reveal

The Women in High Tech Mentoring Programme and why it works

On sponsors, self-doubt, and working your way up without a map