Company's Attempt To Recruit Women, Minorities Sparks Unexpected Reactions
By KYW social media editor Melony Roy
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) - Female engineers, coders and other tech heavyweights have joined a Twitter campaign to break down stereotypes about what engineers should look like.
According to analytics firm Topsy, more than 73,000 people used the hashtag #ILookLikeAnEngineer to post photos of themselves and promote diversity in technology.
But Drexel's Dr. Amy Slaton says there's a downside to this movement:
"It can appear to be a solution when it really is just one move among many more that we need."
Isis Wagner started ilooklikeanengineer.com to encourage women to share their stories and help redefine the expectations of what an engineer looks like.
"As excited as I was to see this happening and women with very different kinds of styles, ages and sexuality celebrating their presence in STEM fields," she says, "they're still a tiny tiny property of the people who are educated, employed and get promoted in these fields"
Wagner wrote in a personal essay posted to Medium that some people questioned whether she was an engineer after she appeared in a recruiting ad for her employer -- software company OneLogin -- because she was not a white or Asian male.
"I'm afraid what happens is it looks like we don't have a problem anymore because we revealed the hidden women or the hidden people of color or the hidden gay engineers," she says.
For real change to occur, Slaton says, more money needs to be funneled into inner city schools and affordable state colleges:
"You can just add women and stir or disabled people and stir that's a very corporate attitudes of diversity that doesn't really change the attitudes in workplaces."