Picture this: you’re a woman. You’ve got a great idea for a startup, but you’re having trouble getting people to work with you on it. You have a sneaking suspicion it’s because of your gender ... although then again, it could all be in your head. What do you do?

Invent a male co-founder, of course.

A pair of artists and entrepreneurs named Penelope Gazin and Kate Dwyer elicited grim laughter from women all over this week when they revealed they’d done just that in their quest to get their startup off the ground.

While the two friends believed they had a good idea in “Witchsy”, an online marketplace for offbeat, feminist, and yes, witchy art, they found the largely male designers and developers they hired to help them were slow-moving and disrespectful. And so, to speed things along, they brought on a third co-founder: a fictional character named Keith (what else?) Mann.

“It was like night and day,” Dwyer told Fast Company. “It would take me days to get a response, but Keith could not only get a response and a status update, but also be asked if he wanted anything else or if there was anything else that Keith needed help with.” Imagine that.

While it might seem like old news that men get an automatic level of respect not enjoyed by women or gender non-binary folks, a shocking number of people still haven’t gotten the memo. (Of course, this disparity is also true for white v non-white Americans.) According to the Pew Research Center, some 59% of US men – a simple majority – refuse to believe that sexism exists.

This army of deniers may have played some part in convincing some 37% of women not to believe it, either.

When people reject a systemic explanation for why women and non-white people have lower pay and and are underrepresented in certain professions, they often blame biological inferiority, a theory often justified by the dicey field of “evolutionary psychology”.

That these ideas have long been discredited did not stop a now former Google employee from parroting them in the anti-diversity manifesto heard ’round the world. He might have been fired swiftly, but rest assured he’s not the only tech bro who holds such views, either consciously or unconsciously.

When men deny the existence of sexism, that message leaks into female minds and manifests in things like “imposter syndrome”, or the feeling that we know nothing about anything and everything we’ve accomplished is a fluke.

I realize men have moments of self-doubt too; I invite them to imagine how much worse said moments would be if an unspecified number of their colleagues believed their true calling was acting as a receptacle for their seed. The looming threat of bias colors your world and makes you second-guess your own perceptions. Was that guy talking down to me, or am I just being hysterical?

This phenomenon is not limited to tech. When the music journalist Jessica Hopper put out a call for women in the music industry to air their grievances via Twitter, she was inundated with stories of everything from annoying microaggressions to straight-up rape.

After receiving lukewarm responses from most literary agents, the novelist Catherine Nichols submitted the same novel under a male name and watched the offers come rolling in.

And while I’m a vocal critic of Hillary Clinton’s politics, I would never deny that sexism played a role in her loss to a supremely unqualified huckster when running for the top job in the country.

I personally have weathered no small amount of unequal treatment in my quest to survive within capitalist patriarchy. From guys with cameras who broke the “no touching” rule to the boss who asked me back to his apartment after office drinks, I’m well acquainted with the workings of sexism. Nine times out of 10, I’ve laughed it off. Not because I like being degraded, but because I needed the work, and had no union to protect my rights.

Of course, I’d be a bad socialist feminist if I did not point out sexism is not only the result of individual bad actors (although it certainly can be) but woven into the very fabric of capitalism. Among other things, it allows those in charge to shame us into buying things we don’t need, underpay female workers, and naturalize valuable labor like cooking and childcare so that we’ll do it for cheap and/or free.

Dismantling this will take a continuing, coordinated effort. For now, it will have to be enough to remind the 63% of women who believe in sexism that they’re not crazy, and to remind everyone else to open their eyes.