A Mann and a plan
By 
In an ideal world, the aspiring business owner’s to-do list would never include Find ways to circumvent sexist bullshit that interferes with the operation of the business.
Unfortunately, we live in the one where a man who brags about grabbing women’s genitals and moving on them comme une chienne gets elected POTUS.
When Penelope Gazin and Kate Dwyer decided to start their own online marketplace for weird art, they didn’t expect it to be easy. After all, the L.A.-based duo of artists were bootstrapping the project with a few thousand dollars of their own money and minimal tech skills. But it wasn’t just a tight budget that added friction to the slow crawl toward launching; the pair also faced their share of doubt from outsiders, spanning from the condescending to the outright sexist.
For example
Some hurdles were overt: Early on a web developer they brought on to help build the site tried to stealthily delete everything after Gazin declined to go on a date with him. But most of the obstacles were much more subtle.
E.g.
After setting out to build Witchsy, it didn’t take long for them to notice a pattern: In many cases, the outside developers and graphic designers they enlisted to help often took a condescending tone over email. These collaborators, who were almost always male, were often short, slow to respond, and vaguely disrespectful in correspondence. In response to one request, a developer started an email with the words “Okay, girls…”
There are a number of ways Gazin & Dwyer could have tackled this problem. Some of them involving guns and grenades and short sharp showers of blood. They decided to get a Mann.
That’s when Gazin and Dwyer introduced a third cofounder: Keith Mann, an aptly named fictional character who could communicate with outsiders over email.
“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.”
Dwyer and Gazin continued to deploy Keith regularly when interacting with outsiders and found that the change in tone wasn’t just an anomaly. 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. One developer in particular seemed to show more deference to Keith than he did to Dwyer or Gazin, right down to the basics of human interaction.
[…]
The imaginary startup entrepreneur Keith Mann will come as little surprise to many women who have worked in tech (not to mention other industries), or anybody who has been keeping up with the news out of Silicon Valley lately. High-profile cases of sexual harassment in the VC world and the controversy over an ex-Google employee’s anti-diversity manifesto are just two of the most recent, notable storylines in the media. Earlier this year, the story of how a pair of male and female colleagues switched email signatures and experienced radically different encounters when dealing with higher-ups and clients went viral. Evidently, email-based sexism in the workplace is something that resonates with more than a handful of people.
On the one hand, Ha ha. What a creative way to counter sexist bullshit. As the article notes, in addition to allowing them to get on with things, it tweaked a few techbro noses. On the other hand, Fuck this shit. Women should not have to lie, or even be economical with the truth, in order to receive decent treatment from anyone, much less people who are taking their money.
