These two female entrepreneurs created a fake man so people would return their messages

(This post originally appeared on The Washington Post)

Keith is the co-founder of Los Angeles-based start-up Witchsy — a cool and quirky online store for illustrations, pins and patches made by artisans and craft makers. Keith’s kind of a dude’s dude. You know what I mean — the guy who played football in college and is now devoted to his wife of five years and can’t wait to be a dad. A real good guy.

Except Keith doesn’t exist. He’s just a guy made up by the two real and female co-founders of Witchsy, Penelope Gazin and Kate Dwyer.  Why would these two women create a fake guy to be their “co-founder?” To get people to respond to their calls and emails — and to get some respect.

“It was very clear no one took us seriously and everybody thought we were just idiots,” Gazin told Quartz. But when “Keith” contacted collaborators, Gazin says, “they’d be like ‘Okay, bro, yeah, let’s brainstorm!’ ”

Welcome to the world of being a female entrepreneur in 2017.

Sure, things have changed since the days of “Mad Men.” But Gazin and Dwyer, two smart people with a cool and growing start-up, still face frequent sexism. Like every young company with meager resources, the co-founders are in need of collaborators and partners — particularly with tech people to help them launch, modify and grow their website. But in their universe of mostly male graphic artists, software developers and website designers, the two found that their calls, messages and requests were often put on the back-burner, or even returned with “slightly rude and condescending” responses, like ” … listen girls.”

So they created Keith — their made-up co-founder who communicated entirely via email (conference calls were scheduled, but then abruptly canceled by Gazin and Dwyer to maintain Keith’s cover). Can you guess what happened?  Yup, people … men … responded. They even (gasp) offered additional help to their new male friend and colleague at Witchsy. Slowly, the female owners could edge into and take over a relationship. But during that transition Keith became integral to getting the company’s website built, and now that it’s fully up and running people are taking the company more seriously.

So where is Keith now? According to Gazin and Dwyer, he’s taking a little time off to be with his new baby. Aww … what a guy.