How to fake working for the Mann

August 30, 2017 12:11 PM

“It was like night and day,” says Dwyer. “It would take me days to get a response, but Keith could not only get a response and a status update, but also be asked if he wanted anything else or if there was anything else that Keith needed help with.”

Sexism in tech is so bad, Witchsy cofounders Penelope Gazin and Kate Dwyer had to invent a male partner called Keith Mann to circumvent it.
posted by MartinWisse (36 comments total)

"I don't even know his real name ..."
posted by maudlin at 12:18 PM on August 30, 2017 [8 favorites]

I will point out that, while many potential investors would recognize the name "Remington Steele," the air dates were long enough ago that it'd be easy to claim "parents loved the name and decided to use it for their son."

Also, note to self: Make sure to give husband a figurehead title in any business I decide to start. Call him CSO and don't tell anyone it means Chief of Sexism Outreach.
posted by ErisLordFreedom at 12:21 PM on August 30, 2017 [74 favorites]

Someone came up with the term “homme de plume” for this, which is just 😙👌
posted by acb at 12:25 PM on August 30, 2017 [167 favorites]

Someone came up with the term “homme de plume” for this

Possibly this: "Homme de Plume: What I Learned Sending My Novel Out Under a Male Name"
posted by jedicus at 12:28 PM on August 30, 2017 [17 favorites]

.
posted by Foci for Analysis at 12:28 PM on August 30, 2017

My sister and her husband and I farm together, and I get so frustrated by the people who only want to talk to my brother in law.

I called the mechanic to get a quote on something for our truck - never mentioned BIL's name. Gave them my phone number. They called him with an answer to my question, which then required more explanation because he hadn't been involved in the initial conversation.

I am doing tractor research and I am dreading when my BIL has to get involved, because as soon as he does I know they are going to deal with him and ignore me. But we can't just pick a tractor without his input.

Basically I am always deciding between taking the easy way of offloading those conversations to him, or the hard way of demanding respect and therefore getting inferior service.
posted by Emmy Rae at 12:34 PM on August 30, 2017 [31 favorites]

In exchange after exchange, the perceived involvement of a man seemed to have an effect on people’s assumptions about Witchsy and colored how they interacted with the budding business.

And I bet every one of them considers themselves a 'nice guy'. Christ I hate the tech industry sometimes.
posted by jedicus at 12:34 PM on August 30, 2017 [12 favorites]

Whoopi Goldberg stars in "The Associate" 1996.

Laurel Ayres (Whoopi Goldberg) is an intelligent investment banker struggling to succeed on Wall Street. When an unqualified white man (Tim Daly) receives a promotion, she quits her job to start her own business, only to learn that, as a woman, she is not taken seriously. To fool her competitors, Laurel creates a fictitious white man named Robert S. Cutty to manage her financial deals. But as Robert's popularity grows, Laurel realizes that living two lives is harder than she thought it might be.
posted by narancia at 12:35 PM on August 30, 2017 [15 favorites]

I want that I'm Fine, pin.
posted by Oyéah at 12:37 PM on August 30, 2017 [3 favorites]

I'm curious about why, if the founders were being treated badly by male developers, they didn't find female or trans or nonbinary developers to hire? Why was their solution to invent a fake man?
posted by Lycaste at 12:42 PM on August 30, 2017 [2 favorites]

'I'm Fine' isn't on their site. They really missed some free marketing with that...

Close enough?
posted by adept256 at 12:49 PM on August 30, 2017

I'm curious about why, if the founders were being treated badly by male developers, they didn't find female or trans or nonbinary developers to hire? Why was their solution to invent a fake man?

Because it might not have been geographically feasible? And, as a startup, they have to watch costs too. Sadly, inventing a man for communications is pretty cheap in cash and time.
posted by Samizdata at 12:49 PM on August 30, 2017 [21 favorites]

Maybe they wanted to prove something? Maybe they just wanted to have the same ease of hiring a developer that a dude would have?

I just feel like this risks tipping over into "if you feministed better, you would get better results".

Also, it assumes that it's only men who treat men better, which has not been my observation.
posted by Frowner at 12:50 PM on August 30, 2017 [91 favorites]

I knew a guy who would use a feminine sounding nick on IRC when he asked tech support questions. This was in the late 90s. He said the guys would always try to impress the girl with how smart and helpful they are. At the same time, I knew a girl who did the opposite because all those guys were creeps.
posted by adept256 at 12:57 PM on August 30, 2017 [14 favorites]

I'm curious about why, if the founders were being treated badly by male developers, they didn't find female or trans or nonbinary developers to hire? Why was their solution to invent a fake man?

The article focuses on interactions with developers, but it might not have been limited to that. Mr. Mann may have been deployed in other situations where Gazin and Dwyer did not have much control over who they were dealing with.

Plus the cost and risk of firing developers and finding new ones.

The medium post about male and female coworkers swapping signatures for a week that the article links to in the second-to-last paragraph is also a great read and could've been an FPP on its own merit.
posted by papercrane at 1:00 PM on August 30, 2017 [13 favorites]

Someone came up with the term “homme de plume” for this, which is just 😙👌

The penis mightier than the sword, indeed.
posted by Celsius1414 at 1:13 PM on August 30, 2017 [10 favorites]

Some of these pins are really cool. Britney's inner pain.

I wondered what the story is about Pizza Panties. Obviously it's to indicate that you're a fan of Panties Pizza, where you can grab a halal calzone if you're in Indonesia. I love Panties, like I love U.

Shut up and take my money.
posted by adept256 at 1:18 PM on August 30, 2017 [1 favorite]

The medium post about male and female coworkers swapping signatures for a week that the article links to in the second-to-last paragraph is also a great read and could've been an FPP on its own merit.

Yeah that was... I mean, not a surprise at all but I bet enlightening to some folks.

I'm the only woman in my quasi-technical department. I don't find I get that much of a difference in treatment (mainly because our client base is universally condescending to everyone, not just women) but I do get less effusive praise when I help. I think because I'm a woman, me being helpful is expected. When the turbonerd dudes that I work with help, people feel like they just won the tech support lottery.
posted by soren_lorensen at 1:19 PM on August 30, 2017 [6 favorites]

I think this is very clever. Sometimes you can't go around, you have to go through.
posted by amanda at 1:24 PM on August 30, 2017 [1 favorite]

Man this is good idea. I'm a dude, so people already respect me more than they should, but maybe I can conjure a millionaire investor to sign some cheques...

(I kid, I kid...)
posted by klanawa at 1:27 PM on August 30, 2017

A market for Inflatable Dudebro Co-founders, sort of like those inflatable dummies they sell for solo motorists wishing to use the car-pool lane.
posted by acb at 1:31 PM on August 30, 2017 [15 favorites]

I knew a guy who would use a feminine sounding nick on IRC when he asked tech support questions. This was in the late 90s. He said the guys would always try to impress the girl with how smart and helpful they are.

I've quite literally been shoved out of the way by men at power tool trade shows in their eagerness to answer my wife's unashamedly gee-I'm-just-a-poor-little-woman questions. I'm six foot four.

I hate that she does it, but I can't deny the effectiveness.
posted by Leon at 1:31 PM on August 30, 2017 [6 favorites]

This sort of thing is going to unfairly raise expectations of the quality of work dudes are capable of.
posted by straight at 1:32 PM on August 30, 2017 [29 favorites]

A market for Inflatable Dudebro Co-founders, sort of like those inflatable dummies they sell for solo motorists wishing to use the car-pool lane.

Or Otto out of Airplane?
posted by Samizdata at 1:46 PM on August 30, 2017 [4 favorites]

A market for Inflatable Dudebro Co-founders

So you're saying we need Dudebrokers?
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 1:51 PM on August 30, 2017 [10 favorites]

These collaborators, who were almost always male, were often short, slow to respond, and vaguely disrespectful in correspondence.

I know "short" probably means "brusque" and "curt" here, but I'm enjoying the mental picture that all the men in question were height-challenged.
posted by Western Infidels at 2:50 PM on August 30, 2017 [5 favorites]

And I bet every one of them considers themselves a 'nice guy'. Christ I hate the tech industry sometimes.

I wish it were only the tech industry.

But the older and more competent I get, the more I see how consistently men ignore me and address the less-knowledgable, less-involved man who happens to be standing next to me. Not just in meetings but when making major purchases, asking for directions, discussing current events, etc, etc
posted by mrmurbles at 3:09 PM on August 30, 2017 [24 favorites]

mrmurbles: But the older and more competent I get, the more I see how consistently men ignore me and address the less-knowledgable, less-involved man who happens to be standing next to me.

My daughter has been watching Paw Patrol, and I've got bad news - the next generation is learning to do this, too. The mayor of Adventure Bay is a woman, and guess what... whenever anything goes wrong, she collapses into flustered uselessness and is rescued by a pre-teen boy and his team of puppies.

One of the five or six puppies is a girl, though, so that makes it all good, right?
posted by clawsoon at 4:27 PM on August 30, 2017 [13 favorites]

(We've been telling our daughters that Zuma is a girl.)
posted by ODiV at 5:40 PM on August 30, 2017 [5 favorites]

On a related note, there are certain people at work where I just have handed off talking to them to my boss, or my (now former) grandboss, because they're men and more powerful and frankly, some people are not going to listen to me because I am a female peon, period. Which they are aware of.

It's like Cyrano, minus the supposed romance, poetry, and long noses.
posted by jenfullmoon at 6:59 PM on August 30, 2017 [1 favorite]

I'm curious about why, if the founders were being treated badly by male developers, they didn't find female or trans or nonbinary developers to hire? Why was their solution to invent a fake man?

As a female developer, I wondered this as well.

A few years ago we had a long discussion at our small firm about the issue of clients not listening to the women at our firm. If a woman told a client something, the client would insist on going over her head to talk to the owner of our firm, a man. But a man talking to a client never had that problem, and it was actually creating something of a bottleneck. We never really resolved it, but I was grateful that everyone saw it for what it was.

On the other hand, I think a large part of my firm's success has been down to the fact that we do not talk down to our clients, male or female, and the female clients clearly appreciate it.
posted by maggiemaggie at 8:58 PM on August 30, 2017 [2 favorites]

Dudebro co-worker #1: (Non-sequitur) What do you think about <female co-worker>?
Dudebro co-worker #2: Nah. Just, no.
Me: No really though, I've worked with her quite alot and she's really very smart and knowledgeable and sharp
Dudebro co-worker #2: We're talking about whether we would fuck her.
posted by XMLicious at 11:21 PM on August 30, 2017 [9 favorites]

XMLicious, I was the foreman of a prefab window factory for a few years. I've heard that conversation many times. They didn't code-switch because they were including you. To them, it's an honour. ONE OF US. It also means they think you are unfuckable and not a sexual entity.

There was a gender divide in our workplace, women worked in the office, taking orders and doing administrative things, and men worked in the factory. As the foreman, I was the intermediary between these two worlds. It really was like two worlds, the office was air-conditioned, the receptionist primly dressed and welcoming. The factory was baking hot and a cacophony of machinery and profanity.

Sometimes I would have to go into their world, in steel capped boots, to do the delicate work of fixing the ailing IT systems. Sometimes the opposite occurred, and one of the girls from the office would come into the factory to amend an order. That was when that kind of conversation you cited would ensue.

This was when I were far younger, and I think having a foot in both camps gave me a broader perspective. I know the office girls talked about me, and it was actually the same kind of talk. They wanted to include me too, when they talked about the boys.

One thing that I am proud of, upon this issue, was that one of my first acts as foreman was to use the blowtorch we used to shrink-wrap our packages to melt the porn wall of pin-ups the former foreman left. Not much was said about it. It was accepted that it wasn't okay anymore.
posted by adept256 at 12:48 AM on August 31, 2017 [18 favorites]

I worked in a scenic construction shop where some random carpenter figured out that I had lived in the Middle East for a long time. The next day, there was a print lying on my paint-mixing bench of a ME woman in a pin-up style shot with an exaggerated Photoshopped amount of pubic hair under her bikini bottom. I spilled paint all over it (aw, whoops) and put up a few pictures of a shirtless Mats Hummels, the best football/soccer defender in the world. Shitty silent hazing didn't happen again, but I don't know if I won or lost that one. Working with men can totally suck, so I can understand making up a guy just so you wouldn't have to actually find one of the not-crappy ones.

Anyway, it was really cool to open the Witchsy site and see work on the front page by one of my favorite high-school friends, Noah Harmon. He is an actually rad dude.
posted by lauranesson at 4:57 AM on August 31, 2017 [6 favorites]

I'm curious about why, if the founders were being treated badly by male developers, they didn't find female or trans or nonbinary developers to hire? Why was their solution to invent a fake man?

"We hired a fake man" is good PR for your startup. "We got sued for discriminatory hiring practices", not so much.
posted by Leon at 2:28 PM on August 31, 2017

Many times in the course of my professional life I've considered trying to neutralize my resume. I even considered changing my name to be more ambiguous just to get my foot in the door. Of course you can just never tell when someone is being biased against you for your sex or color. But basic insubordination, lack of helpfulness, dismissiveness have colored my entire life in various collaborative work environments. It's rarely everyone, it's usually just a couple in any workplace but it's so fatiguing. In the last job I had, I had to pull aside a co-worker in a conference room and confront him a little bit. I wasn't his boss but I was responsible for queueing up his tasks, managing his workload and coordinating team efforts. A young guy, he just was a total foot-dragger and non-communicator. He was a weight on the team and was requiring way to much effort on my part to get him in the groove. I basically laid out the kind of communication level that he wasn't rising too and the kind of initiative that we all expected and then let him talk. He was sooooo uncomfortable by this directness but he said, "well, I just feel like you're my mom and this all just feels like a kind of nagging."

Flames. Flames. On the side of my face....

It was hard to compose myself in that moment but I said: Let me be clear. I am not your mother. I am not a nag. This is my job. My job is to make your queue of work full and to coordinate all efforts to get to a successful project. Your job is to be diligent, communicative when you need more resources or information and then to get the work done. If you want to be successful here and in life and on my team, you will put your best foot forward, take responsibility for yourself and then you can reap the rewards of your success. I do not "nag."

But bless his heart for being honest. It was nice to really know that all my training, hard work, late night planning was reduced to the feeling that I was a nag. After that, he did get better.

So, again, this stuff is real. It's not a PR stunt though I applaud them for using it to get their name out there. I am my own businessperson now but I do have a beard in reserve for certain situations. There's nothing more backwardly satisfying than reading the room, calling it, and getting the win anyway.
posted by amanda at 8:56 AM on September 1, 2017 [20 favorites]