An entrepreneur has issued a grovelling apology after sparking outrage with his Wall Street Journal op-ed suggesting that women who work should disguise their gender.
“I apologize for the dreadful article I wrote in the WSJ,” John Greathouse said in a Twitter message to his nearly 15,000 followers on Thursday. “I told women to endure the gender bias problem rather than acting to fix the problem. I hurt women and I utterly failed to help, which I wholly regret and I apologize for having done.”
The entrepreneur, who is a partner at venture capital firm Rincon Venture Parnters, suggested in Wednesday’s WSJ article that women in tech should hide the fact that they are female when creating their personal brands, because of gender bias.
Greathouse wrote a “neutral online persona,” will “broaden the audience willing to engage with [women] while mitigating potentially negative misconceptions.”
He specifically suggested using initials instead of first names and not including photos in LinkedIn profiles, Twitter accounts, email addresses and online correspondence. “If you identify your team via their initials (men and women), you effectively strip out all preconceptions related to race, ethnicity and gender,” he wrote.
Unsurprisingly, Greathouse’s op-ed was met with much criticism for its insensitive tone. The op-ed on WSJ now has a link to the writer’s apology, which you can read in full here.