Recently, OneLogin, a company that provides identity management for cloud computing applications, released an advertising campaign featuring their own employees in order to market toward new talent. The series contained images and quotes from employees raving about the company; one of these images introducing Platform Engineer, Isis Wenger. The campaign quickly stirred conversation and discussion regarding gender roles in advertising, in both positive and negative lights.
Wenger published a personal essay on Medium after the campaign backlash had begun. What Wenger describes as a “hastily planned” campaign had one simple intention—to recruit potential employers. The text in Wenger’s portion of the campaign read very sexualized to viewers -- “My time is great. Everyone is smart, creative, and hilarious.” Wenger was the only female visual for the campaign.
Facebook and Twitter comments included: “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."
Another said: "If their intention is to attract more women then it would have been better to choose a picture with a warm, friendly smile rather than a sexy smirk."
Both of these comments led Wenger to respond with, "This is not intended to be marketed towards any specific gender — segregated thoughts like that continue to perpetuate sexist thought-patterns in this industry," in her Medium piece.
According to the National Center for Women and Information Technology, women filled only 26 percent of professional information technology roles in 2013. The same studies also found that women received only 18 percent of Computer and Information Science undergraduate degrees earned in 2012. Now you do the math on those statistics. As high functioning members of our modern day society, can we all agree no one is surprised?
Further into Wenger’s personal essay to ask readers the question: “Do you not fit the “cookie-cutter mold” of what people believe engineers “should look like?” Following this prompt, Wenger attached the photo featured below:
This Twitter hashtag opened the gates for other women in the tech industry—of all ages—to let their voices heard. Even large tech based companies used their verified accounts and large followings to showcase women in their offices. Women started tweeting their pictures with captions to shout out their engineering or technology degrees and alma maters while MIT, Pinterest, General Motors and more took it as an opportunity to humble brag about their female interns, employees, and executives.
The campaign not only got OneLogin in the public eye but Wenger is utilizing this opportunity to build a website, ilooklikeanengingeer.com; what she describes to be “a safe platform for us all to continue to share our stories and experiences relating to diversity issues in tech.” To learn more about ilooklikeanengineer.com visit the website itself and their IndieGoGo page here.
