Sunday, August 9, 2015

Woman Behind #ILookLikeAnEngineer Says Campaign Against Gender Stereotypes Is ‘Long Overdue’; New York Times, 8/5/15

Kathryn Varn, New York Times; Woman Behind #ILookLikeAnEngineer Says Campaign Against Gender Stereotypes Is ‘Long Overdue’ :
"What started as an employee recruitment campaign has become a social media movement for women aiming to break stereotypes in the tech industry.
Using the hashtag #ILookLikeAnEngineer, thousands of women have tweeted photos of themselves with explanations of the work they do as engineers.
The hashtag caught fire over the weekend when Isis Wenger published a post on the website Medium about being featured in an ad campaign for OneLogin, the company she works for. The ad attracted much more attention than Ms. Wenger, who describes herself in the post as an “extreme introvert,” anticipated.
She typically doesn’t put a lot of thought into advertising and didn’t expect others would, Ms. Wenger said in an email. Many of the responses were positive, but several expressed disbelief that the ad accurately portrayed what female engineers look like.
“People generating discussions about whether or not I really was a platform engineer for OneLogin were also rather shocking,” she said.
Ms. Wenger said she had received “almost overwhelmingly positive feedback.” She has recruited collaborators to create a location-based app that will allow people to share personal stories about diversity issues in technology, she said."

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