Women in engineering #ILookLikeAnEngineer Wednesday, 05 August 2015

Criticism of an advertising campaign featuring a female engineer in USA has triggered a blowback campaign on social media featuring the hashtag #ILookLIkeAnEngineer.

San Francisco-based cloud-computing company OneLogin launched a billboard recruiting campaign featuring four of their staff with quotes about why they enjoyed working for the company. One of these ads featured platform engineer Isis Wenger with the tag “My team is great. Everyone is smart, creative and hilarious.”

The billboards prompted a number of comments both positive and negative on social media including one saying, “I think they want to appeal to women but are probably just appealing to dudes. Perhaps that’s the intention all along. But I’m curious people with brains find this quote remotely plausible and if women in particular buy this image of what a female software engineer looks like. Idk. Weird.”

Wenger responded with a blog post (https://medium.com/the-coffeelicious/you-may-have-seen-my-face-on-bart-8b9561003e0f) in which she wrote, “The negative opinions about this ad that strangers feel so compelled to share illustrate solid examples of the sexism that plagues tech.”

She also described experiences of inappropriate behaviour involving male colleagues in the past.

“This industry’s culture fosters an unconscious lack of sensitivity towards those who do not fit a certain mold,” Wenger wrote.

“I’m sure that every other women and non-male identifying person in this field has a long list of mild to extreme personal offenses that they’ve just had to tolerate. I’m not trying to get anyone in trouble, fired or ruin anyone’s life. I just want to make it clear that we are all humans, and there are certain patterns of behavior that no one should have to tolerate while in a professional environment.”

Picking up on the quote regarding what female software engineers look like, she suggested it was time for women engineers to redefine what engineers should look like with the hashtag #ILookLIkeAnEngineer.

Women engineers from around the world, including Australia, have responded with pictures of themselves and what they do. Engineers Australia posted a Youtube video of photos from its recent Women in Engineering photo competition (youtu.be/uCdR-R57Ieo).

The August issue of Engineers Australia’s new magazine create will feature an interview with a woman smashing perceptions of what engineers look like. Yassmin Abdel-Magied works as an engineer on an oil rig, was a member of the University of Queensland Formula SAE racing team at university, and is Queensland’s Young Australian of the Year for 2015.