| The gender bias against female founders is well documented. And Penelope Gazin and Kate Dwyer picked up on it immediately after launching Witchsy, an upstart marketplace for quirky art that turned a profit after sales of $200,000 in its first year. "I think because we're young women, a lot of people looked at what we were doing like, 'What a cute hobby!' or 'That's a cute idea,'” Dwyer told Fast Company. The pair noticed that the (mostly male) developers and graphic designers they hired assumed a condescending tone over email; they were terse and slow to respond. That all changed when Gazin and Dwyer invented a fake, third co-founder named Keith Mann to correspond with contributors over email. Dwyer told FastCo what a difference Keith made: "It was like night and day. 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."
The duo’s experience puts into stark relief the everyday sexism women face in the most mundane of business forums, and it backs up research that points to bias against women’s names. For instance, a 2014 study by Insync Surveys and recruitment specialist Hays found that a candidate named Simon Cook was more likely than “Susan Campbell” to get called for an interview. And, like Dwyer and Gazin, other women have worked this blatantly biased system to even the playing field. Erin “Mack” McKelvey told Fortune last year about how—after getting zero replies to job applications submitted with her given name—she sent out CVs listing her first name as Mack and got a 70% response rate. "Was it because it was an unusual name? A male name? A catchy name?” said McKelvey. “I'll never know.” It’s certainly hard to know for sure, but we could wager an educated guess. —@clairezillman | 
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