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Women engineers are sharing their photos to fight sexism in tech

Isis Anchalee starred in an ad, and got some negative comments. Her experience has inspired others.

WHEN ENGINEER ISIS Anchalee took part in a recruitment campaign for her employer OneLogin, she was “blown away” by the attention the image got.

But among the positive comments were negative ones, focusing on her appearance and whether she ‘looked’ like an engineer.

isis ad Medium Medium

Now her experience has led to other female engineers sharing their images and experiences online, using the hashtag #ILookLikeAnEngineer.

In a piece on Medium, Anchalee said that “some of the responses [to the ad] warm my heart while others I consider to be kind of shocking…”

I didn’t want or ask for any of this attention, but if I can use this to put a spotlight on gender issues in tech I consider that to be at least one win. The reality is that most people are well intentioned but genuinely blind to a lot of the crap that those who do not identify as male have to deal with. To list just a couple personal experiences:

She went on:

  • “I’ve had men throw dollar bills at me in a professional office(by an employee who works at that company, during work hours).”
  • “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.”

Anchalee said that the negative opinions about her ad “illustrate solid examples of the sexism that plagues tech”.

She pointed out that she is “just an example of ONE engineer at OneLogin”, and invited people to share their images to “help us redefine ‘what an engineer should look like’”.

Here are some of the many, many tweets she got in response:

Read: What it looks like when you cut all the white people out of Hollywood films>

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