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The author known as James Chartrand of Copyblogger explains why it’s still not a “post-feminist” world.

You know me as James Chartrand of Men with Pens, a regular Copyblogger contributor for just shy of two years.

And yet, I’m a woman.

This is not a joke or an angle or an analogy — I’m literally a woman.

This is my story.

Read the quote in context here.

James was out of work, with two young children, out of savings, out of luck. She began doing freelance copywriting and struggled her ass off. Then something happened.

One day, I tossed out a pen name, because I didn’t want to be associated with my current business, the one that was still struggling to grow. I picked a name that sounded to me like it might convey a good business image. Like it might command respect.
My life changed that day

Instantly, jobs became easier to get.

There was no haggling. There were compliments, there was respect. Clients hired me quickly, and when they received their work, they liked it just as quickly. There were fewer requests for revisions — often none at all.

Customer satisfaction shot through the roof. So did my pay rate.

And I was thankful. I finally stopped worrying about how I would feed my girls. We were warm. Well-fed. Safe. No one at school would ever tease my kids about being poor.

I was still bringing in work with the other business, the one I ran under my real name. I was still marketing it. I was still applying for jobs — sometimes for the same jobs that I applied for using my pen name.

I landed clients and got work under both names. But it was much easier to do when I used my pen name.

Understand, I hadn’t advertised more effectively or used social media — I hadn’t figured that part out yet. I was applying in the same places. I was using the same methods. Even the work was the same.

In fact, everything was the same.

Except for the name.

The blog she started as James, Men with Pens, is a well-respected resource for professional bloggers.

Pretty wild when you think about it. Discouraging too.

She doesn’t mention it but my peripheral experience in the publishing world makes me pretty confident the new work wasn’t all coming in from men who preferred to hire (what they believed to be) male writers.

This isn’t the only time we’ve seen this sort of discrimination based on name only. It’s a fairly common academic and investigative-journalist exercise to pair individuals who are evenly matched except for, say, age, sex, or race, and send them out to apply for work. I’m pretty sure there’s even a study demonstrating that academics are likely to rank submitted papers more favorably when everything else is identical except for a single letter change in the purported author’s first name — e.g. a submission will get a higher rating just by substituting the single letter “a” for “h” in the name “Joan Smith” to make it “John Smith.”

But that’s all fairly academic. James Chartrand’s story is real as houses.

Something to think about next time you imagine there’s nothing left to be done because everything’s already just hunky-dory.

[See also Blue Gal’s take on assumptions about gender and pen names. —fl]