Women In Tech: #ILookLikeAnEngineer Takes Twitter By Storm, Launches Gender Equality Movement (TWEETS)

An ordinary recruitment post sparked controversy in social media recently and launched a movement in technology industry overnight. The OneLogin ad featured Isis Wenger beside the slogan, "My team is great. Everyone is smart, creative and hilarious." But some netizens became critical, flooding her Facebook account with accusations that she is too sexy for the poster and that the ad itself was only a gimmick to lure women.

Some particularly nasty comments were documented by TechCrunch and here is one of them:

"This is some weird haphazard branding. 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 if women in particular buy this image of what a female software engineer looks like. Idk. Weird."

In response to the criticisms, Wenger posted #ILookLikeAnEngineer in Twitter last Monday. She also wrote an essay for Medium describing her experience, where she said:

"I'm just a human and I prefer to keep my life simple/reserved, but it blows my mind that my fully-clothed smiling face with unbrushed hair and minimal makeup on a white wall is seemingly more controversial in some communities than this simply because of my gender."

Her case has since garnered massive attention mostly from women who experience the same sexism at work and in the technology industry. Many of these began using #ILookLikeAnEngineer so that it began trending in Twitter.

The remarkable response to Wenger's experience took a life of its own and began to be equated with changing the way women or what CNN called as "attractive techie" are viewed in the technology industry, particularly with the idea that they didn't fit with the mold they thought an engineer should look like.