#ILookLikeAnEngineer

A quick selfie for #ILookLikeAnEngineer

On Saturday Isis Anchalee wrote this post on Medium about how she is in fact an engineer. She had to write this piece, because she was part of an ad campaign for her employer and people found it oh-so-hard to to believe she is an engineer. You know, because she’s pretty.

I’ve written about issues like this before. In an attempt to get women into STEM we’ve strengthened the notion that women who are feminine can’t be engineers or scientists or mathematicians.  So when we see a woman like Isis, we don’t believe a “girl like that” could also be an engineer.

News flash: How one looks has no bearing on how they can program, design, or architect any sort of product.

Even though I was dressed in a fairly stereotypical way, and have a certain conflict with my engineer title (I still feel analyst is more accurate for most QA work) I added my selfie to the #ILookLikeAnEngineer mix. Because the more faces we get in this movement, the more we show girls in high school in middle school that we are out there. That we have a variety of interests in and out of technology. We exist. And when they enter our world, they will not be alone.