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What Does an Engineer Look Like?

By Eden Rohatensky
Alisha Ramos

This past weekend Isis Anchalee, an engineer at OneLogin wrote a Medium post responding to the reactions of an ad campaign she was featured in. At the end of her article, she asked women engineers to tweet photos of themselves with the hashtag #ILookLikeAnEngineer to showcase the diversity in appearance among women in the industry.

Alisha Ramos, Front-End Designer on our Revenue Products team, saw the hashtag and decided to participate. "I love the #ILookLikeAnEngineer trend because it is completely changing the status quo of what people think of when they think of an engineer. Society is used to thinking of the 'average' engineer as a white male, but increasingly this is not the case. The diversity of women (and some men too) posting with that hashtag is incredible...where they come from, their backgrounds, their jobs even (there are so many cool women who work in aerospace engineering who have posted their photo!)"

Engineering Intern, Nicole Zhu, appreciates the wide appeal of the hashtag. "Even though it started based on gender diversity, I love that it also expanded to include other minorities in tech. A lot of people started tweeting additional things about themselves like "I like cats" – showing that engineers are people with diverse interests."

Pam Assogba, Full Stack Engineer on Revenue Products, says that "since the hashtag is accessible to anyone with a Twitter account – or just an internet connection, anybody that thought they didn't fit the stereotypical mold can look at all the beautiful people participating in the hashtag, and see how diverse the community can be."

Using Vox Media's open-sourced meme generator tool, Alisha built an image generator to help spread the word further. "I made the image generator because I thought it would be neat to show solidarity through design, if that makes sense. If someone opened up their feed and saw a constant stream of similar-looking photos, they would be bound to be curious to find out more. The other reason is that I've been playing around with the canvas element for work anyway, so this was a great excuse to practice some more + make something semi-useful while I'm at it!"

A whole bunch of our team members participated in the hashtag, which you can see below. Be sure to check out Alisha's image generator and make your own meme!

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