“Your potential is only limited by your mind,” declared Isis Anchalee, platform developer at OneLogin, Inc. Anchalee ought to know, as her second ever Tweet went viral. The progenitor of #ilooklikeanengineer is a self-professed college dropout, who taught herself to code and now “earns a shit-load of money … with zero school debt.”

Anchalee said that when she tweeted the #ilooklikeanengineer photo, she wasn’t thinking just about women, but “all people, all genders… and cultures.”

Anchalee sat down with John Furrier and Jeff Frick, co-hosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, at The Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing 2015 in Houston, TX. The engineer remarked, “I have never seen so many female engineers in one room.”

The Celebration has approximately 12,000 women in attendance. Anchalee stated that events like Grace Hopper help build a community to support diversity in the industry. She cited figures from Harvard Business Review that see a trend of 41 percent of women leaving the tech field after seven years.

Source: #ilooklikeanengineer

“A lot of numbers support that diversity is important in the workplace,” said Anchalee. Those numbers may “provide a statistical reality… but a human element is needed.” #Ilooklikeanengineer is creating that human element by putting a thousand faces in the industry. Anchalee commented that companies see better performance from workers who feel accepted in their workplace without having to “sacrifice” part of themselves. She is “looking forward to a future where diversity is the norm.”

Watch the full video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of Grace Hopper Celebration of Woman In Computing. And join in on the conversation by CrowdChatting with theCUBE hosts.

Photo by SiliconANGLE