Dear John Greathouse: women in tech have some advice for you too

John Greathouse, a venture capitalist, recently decided to ignore the sense he was born with and pen an article giving his helpful opinion on what women in tech - a group he has never been part of - should be doing to overcome sexism. That’s right, folks, once again the burden falls not on the discriminators, but the discriminated against, because it’s just too damn hard for the old guard to change their ways. They’re too busy investing in stuff and writing terrible advice articles that are somehow published in the Wall Street Journal.

Since then, Greathouse has apologised for what he calls his “dreadful” piece, though stopped short of actually promising to do anything at all to change the status quo. Nor did the WSJ apologise or respond, possibly because his paywalled garbage has brought them oodles of rage-traffic.

The TL;DR of Greathouse’s post is that after looking at research on how unconscious bias limits women’s achievements in technology, he comes to the conclusion that creating a gender-neutral online persona is the best way for women to make a good first impression and sidestep all that pesky sexism. Man, why didn’t we think of that?

Since his horribly-formatted apology (white text on black? Really, John?) goes zero miles towards fixing the problem, we’ve got some advice of our own. From an actual woman in tech.

Take it away, Jessica:

Dear John,

Thanks so much for your advice. It’s clear that it came from a well-intentioned sort of space, but I wanted to write you back to look at all the reasons it’s garbage.

1. This isn’t a new idea for us

Almost every woman who has ever communicated online has at some time, in some context masked her gender. While you point out that gender can colour first impressions of people and that we might want to hide our feminine graces to make a better first impression professionally, lots of the internet is flat out hostile to women’s participation in online spaces. You advise us that “a gender-neutral persona allows women to access opportunities that might otherwise be closed to them” and this is true. We’ve been using these personas to access online interactions without harassment, threats or exclusion for some time. However…

2. There’s value in professional visibility