What is the #ILookLikeAnEngineer campaign?
The #ILookLikeAnEngineer started after security company OneLogin ran an advert to recruit new developers. The advert featured one of its platform engineers, Isis Wenger.
After the advert went live she wrote a blog on Medium posting the picture. Many readers started to leave her comments such as: “If their intention is to attract more women than it would have been better to choose a picture with a warm, friendly smile rather than a sexy smirk”, after she was accused of being too sexy in the advert.
She decided to blog about her experiences as a woman in the tech sector and said: "I’ve had men throw dollar bills at me in a professional office (by an employee who works at that company, during work hours)" and "I’ve had an engineer on salary at a bootcamp message me to explicitly 'be friends with benefits' while I was in the interview process at the school he worked for".
She eventually took to Twitter to post a picture of herself (see next slide) with the hashtag #iLookLikeAnEngineer and within a day it went viral and far beyond what the advert had started.
The #ILookLikeAnEngineer campaign was started to break the stereotypes which surround female engineers. Thousands of female engineers soon took to Twitter to dispel the negative stereotypes surrounding the type of women that go into engineering.