Someone’s got to say it, right? Women simply can’t expect to be taken seriously if they keep going on and on about their womanness. For example, did you know that a lot of women use their real names and photos online? This allows prospective employers and business contacts to immediately spot their unfortunate birth defect and dismiss them before they’re allowed to prove themselves.
If you don’t take this seriously, let me refer you to a man. On Wednesday, John Greathouse, writing in the Wall Street Journal (a reputable publication read by many professional men) suggested women in tech should consider going just by their initials or a unisex name online. Greathouse explains that women “should create an online presence that obscures their gender [as a] gender-neutral persona allows women to access opportunities that might otherwise be closed to them.” In other words, people will like you more if they don’t think of you as a woman first.
OK. But what exactly is a gender-neutral persona anyway? Tilda Swinton? Not exactly. Greathouse explains “neutral” basically means being a white man. “I am not suggesting people shun their ethnicity and run from their cultural identities,” he stresses. However, “many people in the business community” are biased, and we need to accept this hard fact and work around it.
Greathouse is a partner at Rincon Venture Partners, teaches at the University of California at Santa Barbara and is a “WSJ leadership expert”. His Twitter header displays screenshots of all his important business articles. In short, he is an expert and leader you should take seriously.
Also, his article contains a lot of statistics. These are all used to support his idea that business leaders should not be expected to address their unconscious bias but, rather, women should simply accommodate themselves to it. I know, the logic does seem a little flawed, but there really are a lot of statistics! And you can’t argue that acting more like a man has had a significant return on investment for women in the past. Would Mary Ann Evans, for example, have secured VC funding for The Mill on the Floss if she hadn’t presented as George Eliot?
To find out more about Greathouse’s groundbreaking theory, I talked to a woman using this very trick.
JB Rubinovitz, a machine learning scientist and developer, started going by her initials and a gender-ambiguous avatar a year ago. As a moderator of a “hackathon hackers” Facebook group with almost 40,000 people, Rubinovitz says she “received harassment and threats daily” for being vocal about inclusivity. “It was unsustainable and I did not feel like myself.”
Obscuring her gender identity made an “incredibly significant” difference in how she was treated, Rubinovitz said. “It made me more palatable.” People would still rebuff her opinions about inclusivity, but in a very different way. When she was Jennifer, men would “try to get into my DMs (direct messages) to intimidate me”. Now, however, she has men telling her to “back off when I try to advocate for women, because I am a ‘white man’.”
Rubinovitz believes it’s unfortunate but true that women in tech are taken more seriously offline as well as online when they adopt more of a masculine presence. “I generally have a more masculine presence and feel I enjoy privileges in technology for it that my more feminine friends do not. On days I am more feminine, I do not carry the perks I gained when presenting more masculine.”
Based on her experience, she “strongly believe[s] feigning gender neutrality will not get women any further in the business world, unless you continuously adopt a more masculine presence.”
Obscuring her gender identity is certainly not something she’d suggest to other women in tech. “We should be expecting the business with unconscious bias to confront that bias,” Rubinovitz says. “We need to be talking about who will hold the community accountable for sexism, not expect women to act like men.”
Oh, I don’t know. It sounds like something a woman would suggest.
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