An investor and entrepreneur who also also teaches entrepreneurship at UC, Santa Barbara, has come up with a way for women to get good jobs in the tech industry: use your initials or a gender-neutral name on applications and profiles. This will hide the fact that you’re female. In fairness, John Greathouse apologized later for his statement. But it points out how rampant gender bias is in some industries.
See Wall Street Journal article. Click the X in the upper right corner of the ad to get rid of it. If the Journal won’t let you in, get to it via this other article.
Of course, women poets and writers have had to use this trick since the beginning of time–even JK Rawlings. Only, though, if they wanted their work to be published and they weren’t a celebrity.
The point is, Greathouse is just reflecting the thoughts, beliefs, and biases of a large number of people. I think it’s interesting that rather than offering a solution to solve this societal problem, he offered a way to cover it up and continue it.
