Social Good Engineering Magazine: GineersNow Social Innovation GineersNow Engineering Magazine Issue No. 001 | Page 71

The #ILookLikeAnEngineer
Campaign Wants To End Gender
Discrimination in Engineering
So, what does an engineer look like to you?
When Isis Wenger agreed to become part
of her company’s recruiting campaign, she
did not expect to receive a lot of backlash
from the internet. Some have questioned her
image as a female engineer. Some expressed
that this was the company’s attempt to
capture male engineers’ attention. So, in an
article she wrote in Medium, she inspired
other engineers to help her campaign in
spreading awareness in tech diversity:

“Do you feel passionately
about helping spread aware-
ness and increase tech diversi-
ty?

Do you not fit the “cook-
ie-cutter mold” of what people
believe engineers “should look
like?”

If you answered yes to any of
these questions I invite you to help spread
the word and help us redefine “what an
Photo Source: Goodnet
engineer should look like”.

As soon as word spread out, oth-
er female engineers have posted their own
pictures with the hastag #ilooklikeanengi-
neer. Her article generated thousands of
responses, which led to a group of female
engineers crowdfunding around $50,000
to put up billboards in Silicon Valley. These
billboards aimed to end gender discrimina-
tion by showing that not all engineers are in
the form of hoodie-wearing white guys.

The billboards were seen
throughout San Francisco – targeted espe-
cially in places where people who work for
tech companies take their commute on the
way to work.

Given Silicon Valley’s reputation
in having low diversity in its hiring, these
billboards featured women and men of
different colors and race – clearly not the
type who fits into the stereotype. Despite the
attempts made to spread awareness through
these billboards, not much buzz was created
in Twitter on the topic.
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Really now? Can’t
a girl look exactly
the way she wants
to look and still
be an engineer?
News flash: It’s
2016. Female en-
gineers exist and
we don’t have to
look like Mark
Zuckerberg.
#iLookLikeAnEngineer
by Alice Hernandez