Are you saying it may not be sexism? What then?
Saying "sexism" has with it the connotation that there is a fundamental wrong here which should be corrected for the betterment of our society. That it's a product of backwards thinking and known prejudices.
What you are seeing here though is much more than that. We're seeing that people conform to a pre-ordained bias. In this case, that all good writers are upper-crust white guys with distinguished names. This is a much deeper and subconscious display of human behaviour that all of us are bound to.
It is unlikely that all of this woman's readers feel women should be barefoot in the kitchen.
Women not being rewarded equally for equal work is a fundamental wrong which should be corrected for the betterment of our society. It's possible I'm misreading you but one can be sexist without being a cave, um, person.
What if she had to meet a client face-to-face? Or even by phone?
In any case, if she went to see the client face-to-face or by phone, all sorts of other things might have happened. She might have fared better on average than a man. There is no way to tell from her story.
It really is just a story, all sorts of other parameters could have affected the outcome. What sort of thing is she writing? Some subjects might be more readily associated with men, other with women.
The choice of names could have an effect in all sorts of ways, not only by signaling a gender.
Really, there is no substance here at all, I am sorry. If people want to get worked up about that story, it is because they want to get worked up about it, not because there is real substance.
For a better experiment, take the one with randomized CVs with randomized names, where black sounding names fared a lot worse than white sounding names. That is a proper experiment, because all other things besides the names were equal. This story here is not science. She herself is drawing a conclusion from her experience, but her subjective explanation doesn't really explain anything.
This story doesn't pretend to be science, why are we comparing it to randomized double-blind studies?
I would love to see more and better science on the topic but I think there is still value in anecdotes and the discussions they result in.
I do think they are controversial, as the statistics are usually very shallow. Apart from the "dumb" statistics (basically "on average, men earn more than women"), there are also lots of papers on how certain laws that are supposed to be helping women actually have the opposite effect, and other causes for the difference.
The "uncontroversial" bit is exactly what is standing in the way of finding a solution.
Anecdotes are OK, but don't generalize from them, please.
And how do you propose we fix it?
There is no obvious reason why a woman would be paid less for the same work, for example a rule saying "pay a woman $5 less than a man", or even an actual conspiracy that may be slightly less obvious but is still a clear problem. So therefore, "women getting paid less than man for the same work" is not really a description of the problem, it's just a symptom.
Yet it still happens. Before we can fix it, we need to know why, otherwise there's a good chance we'll be creating more problems.
I do not, however, agree that honest discussion can't benefit. Most of the problems I see in online conversations regarding sexism/gender/etc involve nearly everyone involved no matter their position flying straight through the actual words on screen into some higher dimension of rape culture vs the PC feminazis. It's insane, frustrating in the extreme and entirely counterproductive. There's a lot of baggage held by everyone and I think realizing that people can disagree and still converse on the subject would be an excellent first step both towards discerning a root cause and effecting a change.
That's behind my call for an honest discussion and I thank you wholeheartedly for participating.
Yes, I am frustrated by the same thing. That is exactly why I was disappointed by the article, because the comments about activism and 19th century stigmas lead directly down that path.
Unless you're proposing communism in the absolute, I'm not sure how you can enforce what an audience (including many women) likes or doesn't like. The fact that what they think they like or not is in some way based on unconscious arguments to authority is not something you can legislate.
The point is that the discussion cannot stop with the sexism label. It's impossible to make progress when you conclude by blaming vague 19th century ideas about gender. There's nowhere to go from there. That's my problem with the article.
[1] For example, the poster who wrote this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=994830
Why does 'sexism' immediately and irrevocably equate to "vague 19th century ideas about gender"? What word would be more productive? Why?
Once people agree that sexism is the problem, useful discussion ends. You can still argue about whether it's sexism, or you can argue about solutions for solving sexism (see: Gender Studies). Neither one of those are likely to help you discover the real reasons why this particular woman found so much more success with a male pseudonym.
As for proof-- see most of this thread. Rather than discussing solutions or looking for explanations, it's mostly attempts to challenge the assumption I quoted.
> Why does 'sexism' immediately and irrevocably equate to "vague 19th century ideas about gender"? What word would be more productive? Why?
The article itself doesn't actually use the word. neilk used it as a fairly accurate summation of what was implied by the article.
She suggests that activism is the answer (and goes on to say she doesn't have the time for it). Activism against what? Apparently, according to the article, 19th century stigmas, which are defined circularly as whatever made people not hire her until she chose a male name.
I'm simply doing what most of the posters here did subconsciously and am challenging the assertion that "sexism is the problem," not because it's wrong, but because it's not meaningful.
I'd very much like to continue this thread but I'd ask you to please elaborate on your position or support it in some way or we'll descend into "does not!" "does too!" rather rapidly. Alternatively we can attempt to frame the discussion in another way that you find meaningful.
Accepting generic sexism as the problem to solve is what ends useful discussion. It doesn't matter what specific words are used. James didn't use that word at all in the section I identified, but the point remains the same.
And to be more precise, when I say "end useful discussion" mean that until the bad assumption is retracted, progress towards real understanding and, consequently, good solutions, will be difficult.
Incidentally, the main point of the original article was to out the author as a woman. But the complaints about sexism are fairly obvious. My criticism was restricted to that and not intended to completely invalidate the entire post.