Yes, these days there may be a lack of women in the science and technology fields, but did you know that the first ever computer programmer was actually a woman? Yup, Ada Lovelace is credited with writing the first ever algorithm intended to be carried out by a machine all the way back in the 1850s.
Today is the sixth anniversay of Ada Lovelace Day, the annual celebration of women working in the fields of science, technology, engineering and maths (Stem), which aims to raise the profile of women in Stem to encourage more girls and women to take up careers in these fields.
But stereotypes surrounding what a certain person should look like still persist. You’d think we’d have kind of gathered by now that you can be good looking and intelligent, smart and funny and so on, and that none of these things are mutually exclusive – but apparently not everyone got the memo.
Isis Anchalee, a software engineer in San Fransisco who taught herself how to code at the age of eight was shocked when a photo of her holding up a sign saying ‘I help build enterprise software #iamanengineer’ went viral on social media with people questioning if she was actually an engineer due to her appearance.
Now thousands of people, from surgeons to physicists and more have since adopted the idea, taking to social media to post pictures of themselves alongside hashtags including #IlooklikeaScientist, #IlooklikeaGameDev and #IlooklikeaDoctor because, newsflash, what you look like actually has nothing to do with what your job is! Shocking, we know.
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.