It started when a “self-taught engineer, extreme introvert, science-nerd, anime-lover, college dropout” wrote that she was tired of stereotypes.
Isis Wenger, 22, a platform engineer in San Francisco, got talked into being one of a handful of colleagues featured in a hastily organized recruiting campaign for her company OneLogin, she wrote on Medium.
The response shocked her. Friends forwarded her posts from complete strangers responding to the photo, and soon they didn’t need to send them — they were everywhere.
Still, there was her image, triggering all this reaction — a lot of it negative. And a lot of it mirroring attitudes she often saw in the tech world, she wrote — from men who seemed like pretty smart and normal guys who didn’t know how uncomfortable their comments might make someone.
Like when male colleagues threw dollar bills at her in the office.
She ended the post with a challenge:
“Do you feel passionately about helping spread awareness about tech gender diversity?
“Do you not fit the ‘cookie-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 engineer should look like’ #iLookLikeAnEngineer.”
And she posted a photo of herself with the hashtag.
It took off.
“I think the message went viral because it’s not just my message,” Wenger wrote in response to questions from The Post. That’s why she made sure the hashtag was so all-encompassing. “It addresses a problem that many people of different genders and ethnic backgrounds face.”
“Especially when I was first starting out in the industry, people were very condescending,” she said.
But growing up, the only child of a single mother, a teacher, she had already taught herself to build websites by the time she was 8, by right-clicking ” ‘view source’ on Neopets and reverse-engineering bits of code to figure out what each individual tag did.”
If colleagues had low expectations, she showed them up.
Soon there were #ILookLikeAnEngineer tweets from women all over the world (and a few men), tired of surprised looks when they meet a client or arrive at an interview.
By Tuesday afternoon, the hashtag had sparked 36,000 tweets, and other innovations, showing women in caps and gowns, Lilly Pulitzer and pink hair — a storytelling app about diversity in tech, and a T-shirt someone designed featuring the hashtag with half the proceeds going to a charity Wenger selects.
When she was in college at the University of West Virginia , Emily Calandrelli, who posted a photo of herself with that hashtag at Lick Observatory in California, was one of just two women in a big science class.
“We definitely stood out,” she said.
Now the host and producer of Fox’s “Xploration Outer Space,” Calandrelli interviews experts in space exploration about their research. “A lot of times when I walk into those environments they make the assumption that I don’t have an understanding of science of space exploration — perhaps because I’m a woman or how I present myself on camera, with makeup, hair, all that.”
When Calandrelli asked an engineer at a company developing a spacecraft about the type of propulsion they were using and the specific challenges they were having, “the guy looked at me and said, ‘Did one of my guys tell you to ask that?’ “
There could have been a few reasons why he was surprised, she said; maybe he didn’t expect such a topical question. “In my head, I was thinking, ‘If I were a big burly man, would you ask this?’
” ‘Nope,’ she told him. ‘I came up with that question all by myself.’ “
