Women of Microsoft join Twitter campaign engineered to change stereotypes

When people hear the word “engineer” many arguably think of a man on a building site in a yellow hard hat with some plans in his hand. In fact, search the internet and it too will bring you that image first; go ahead and try it. However, engineers are a diverse bunch, ranging from the men on the building site to the women bringing us Hololens, Windows 10 or even the Orion space ship.

This stereotype is the focus of a new Twitter campaign and women of the web are joining in the effort. Many are sharing their photos and a description of what they work at on #ILookLikeAnEngineer to shift the stereotype a little more in the direction of reality.

It all started when platform engineer Isis Wenger’s image featured as part of a recruitment drive by her company Onelogin. She was appalled by the response online because it fixated on how she looked and not on what she worked at. She either wasn’t a man or didn’t match the image of a female engineer. So she wrote a blog post about how much this bothered her and put out a call to woman engineers to support her campaign.

Step in the women of Microsoft. In an effort to drive the campaign forward, the women of Microsoft have been joining in on the fun, and that’s what this is; a fun campaign that just wants to teach (tweach?) and not preach. You can find just a sample of the Microsoft tweets throughout this article.

To be clear, no matter what any keyboard warrior may say, it’s blatant sexism to judge the skill of someone because of her gender alone. Microsoft is absolutely behind the effort with Satya Nadella retweeting one of the Microsoft tweets. Nadella has outlined his stance on this issue in the past, and it is yet another area that Microsoft leads.