Female Tech Entrepreneurs Invent Male Co-Founder to Beat Industry Sexism

Original article on OddityCentral.com – a blog on oddities and wacky news http://www.odditycentral.com/

After noticing that many of the male developers and graphic designers they approached were either condescending or vaguely disrespectful, two female tech entrepreneurs decided to invent a male partner to handle communications. They claim that the difference was “like night and day”.

A year ago, Penelope Gazin and Kate Dwyer decided to create an online marketplace for bizarre and dark-humored art, as an alternative to big sites like Etsy, which they believe have too much limitations and excessive censorship. With minimal tech skills and a very limited budget of a few thousand dollars of their own money, getting “Witchsy” off the ground was never going to be easy, but one thing the two ladies didn’t expect was to be treated differently simply because of their sex. Some of the people they contacted to work on the site either took a condescending tone with them, like opening an email with “Okay, girls”, while others took it even further, like a developer who tried to delete their site because Penelope refused to go on a date with him. But everything changed when a certain “Keith” took over communications.