Of course, as a freelance writer, this is a topic near and dear to my heart; however, this same sort of phenomenon can occur in any industry and affect any demographic.

Whether we're conscious of it, or not, we stereotype people constantly, for a variety of reasons. What's disturbing is we're not doing much of anything to correct our behavior and too many people aren't speaking up, demanding equal treatment when they should because, ultimately, not paying people the same rates for the same work — or treating people unequally in other ways — is a human rights issue. Period.

Today, Men with Pens blogger James Chartrand revealed that "he" is actually a lady with a laptop. After working under her real name for years, Chartrand was still struggling to make it as a freelance writer. Not only was her income negligible, but "I was treated like crap, too. Bossed around, degraded, condescended to, with jibes made about my having to work from home. I quickly learned not to mention I had kids. I quickly learned not to mention I worked from my kitchen table." Out of desperation, she started submitting work under a male pseudonym, just to see if it made a difference. And boy, did it ever.

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.

I think Mary Elizabeth Williams spoke for all of us at Broadsheet when she said in an e-mail, "Wow! That's so fucking Brontë sisters!" George Eliot and George Sand also leapt quickly to mind; when we think of women writers finding success under male pseudonyms, our thoughts naturally turn to the 19th century. But then, Chartrand also mentions Isak Dinesen, whose first book was published in 1934. And come to think of it, I've read that in the late 1990s, J.K. Rowling became known as such because her publishers feared that boys wouldn't read books written by someone named Joanne. Last spring, the website Divine Caroline made a list of seven famous female authors who used male names, including Alice Bradley Sheldon, who found it easier to break into science fiction writing in 1967 as James Tiptree, Jr., and Nora Roberts, who chose the name J.D. Robb in 1995 when she began writing detective fiction alongside her wildly successful romance novels. When much-admired political blogger Digby accepted an award in person in 2007, some of her biggest fans were shocked to learn that she's a woman.

Read the rest of this Salon.com post, by Kate Harding, here.

Read the writer out herself in her own words:

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.

Once upon a time, I found myself having to make some hard decisions.

The welfare application was on my kitchen table. It was filled out and signed, waiting for me to bring it to the people who would decide whether I’d be able to make rent next month or put food on the table.

I hated looking at it. I didn’t want to be in this situation. I’d thought that when you start over, make a clean break, life was supposed to get better, right?

But here I was, out of money and out of choices.

I had two young daughters to take care of. I was single and alone, having left an unhealthy relationship, and I was living in a crappy, tiny apartment.

I’d used up my savings trying to make ends meet, supplementing as best I could with the money I earned from a dangerous part-time job that gave me all of 4 hours pay a week at minimum wage. I had been looking for a better job, but there were none to be had in the low-income/high-unemployment area where I lived.

And I couldn’t get a full-time job anyway — I was still on the waiting list for a spot in daycare.

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.

Taking a man’s name opened up a new world. It helped me earn double and triple the income of my true name, with the same work and service.

No hassles. Higher acceptance. And gratifying respect for my talents and round-the-clock work ethic.

Business opportunities fell into my lap. People asked for my advice, and they thanked me for it, too.

Did I quit promoting my own name? Hell yeah.

I never wanted to be an activist, or to fight the world. I’m not interested in clawing my way up a ladder to a glass ceiling. Life’s too short for that.

I just want to earn a living and be respected for my skills. I want my kids to be happy and have access to what they need. I want them to go to university and have good opportunities in life.

Truth be told, if just a name and perception of gender creates such different levels of respect and income for a person, it says a lot more about the world than it does about me.

Read the rest of  at CopyBlogger.com.

In related news: 'Does it matter that she's a woman? With opinion writing still dominated by men, the answer is a loud yes.' (Salon.com, 2007)

What do you think? What can we do to shatter the glass ceiling once and for all? (This movie doesn't get going until 0:54, if you want to skip ahead.)

Now, was all that stressing about Bank of America hightailing it to New York City worth it, negative nellies? Noooo.

But don't let this news put your industrious fires out people. We've still got to diversify if we want to be an attractive, competitive city.

Bank of America's board has selected Brian Moynihan as the bank's new chief executive, spokesman Bob Stickler said this evening.

Moynihan, previously the bank's consumer banking head, will have his office in Charlotte and the bank will remain headquartered in Charlotte, Stickler said.

After Bank of New York Mellon Corp. chief executive Bob Kelly dropped out of the running on Monday, Bank of America Corp.'s board was expected to choose from two internal candidates – Moynihan and chief risk officer Greg Curl – to replace departing CEO Ken Lewis.

Lewis, 62, announced Sept. 30 that he was stepping down at year's end, ending a four-decade career at the company amid mounting criticism of his Jan. 1 Merrill Lynch & Co. acquisition. The search for his replacement, led by a six-director committee, dragged on longer than many expected, entering its 11th week on Wednesday.

Moynihan, 50, is a lawyer by training. He joined a FleetBoston predecessor in the early '90s as deputy counsel, then moved into finance jobs.

By 2004, when Bank of America bought FleetBoston, Moynihan was in charge of the brokerage and wealth management unit. He held virtually the same job at the combined new bank, and stayed in Boston. The unit, and hundreds of bank leaders, moved there.

In 2007, Moynihan was put in charge of the investment bank and charged with cleaning it up. The next year, Lewis put him in charge of leading the integration with Merrill.

In August, in another management shakeup that Lewis orchestrated, Moynihan was named head of consumer banking.

Read the rest of this Charlotte Observer article, by Rick Rothacker and Christina Rexrode, here.

In related news: Bank of America shareholder: Don't choose Curl or Moynihan for CEO

In barely related news: Fifth Third Bank is moving Uptown

And, lookie, the new CEO has already ticked off some members of Congress:

Another amazing investigative journalism piece of awesomeness from our friends at ProPublica — by Jake Bernstein and Jesse Eisinger

This story is part of an ongoing investigation with NPR's Planet Money .

Almost three years since banks started taking losses that led to the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, the Securities and Exchange Commission is still asking basic questions about what happened.

The SEC is conducting an information-gathering sweep of the key players in the market for collateralized debt obligations, the bundles of mortgage securities whose sudden collapse in price was at the center of the meltdown of the global banking system.

In a letter dated Oct. 22, the SEC sent what amounts to a questionnaire to a number of collateral managers, the middlemen between the investment banks that created the complex financial products and the investors who bought them.

Collateralized debt obligations are made up of dozens if not hundreds of securities, which in turn are backed by underlying loans, such as mortgages. Investment banks underwrite the structures and recruit their investors. Collateral managers, brought in by the investment banks but paid by fees from the assets, select the securities and manage the structures on behalf of the investors. CDO managers have a fiduciary duty to manage the investments fairly for investors.

Since 2005, $1.3 trillion worth of CDOs have been issued, with a record $521 billion in 2006, according to the securities industry lobbying group SIFMA. The collapse in value of mortgage CDOs triggered the 2008 financial collapse.

ProPublica and NPR have confirmed that the SEC letter was sent to several managers, although the distribution list was likely industrywide. At the height of the boom in 2006, only 28 managers controlled about half of all CDOs, according to Standard and Poor's.

Banks began disclosing the first big losses on CDOs in early 2007. The infamous Bear Stearns hedge funds ran into problems beginning that summer.  By that August, the credit markets began seizing up.  Merrill Lynch and Citigroup were among the hardest hit by losses on bad investments in mortgage-based securities and CDOs.

The SEC’s letter focuses on information regarding “trading, allocation and valuations and advisers’ disclosure,” though it also asks for other details on how the managers ran their businesses. The letter requests information on CDOs issued since Jan. 1, 2006.

The letter asks collateral managers for information about what investments they made on their own behalf and how they valued these investments. Securities experts say the letter indicates that the agency is still gathering basic information about the CDO market, despite its centrality to the banking crisis.

“One wonders why this letter, especially given the general nature of it, is just now being sent. And why wasn’t it sent several years ago, as the CDO market was exploding?” says Lynn Turner, who was the SEC’s chief accountant in the late 1990s. “It makes it look like the SEC is several years behind the markets.”

Even Wall Street executives and securities lawyers who were involved in the CDO business at its height have privately expressed surprise that the SEC was only now contacting them for such rudimentary information.

The SEC declined to comment on the letter. As a policy, a spokesman said, the agency doesn’t comment on its regulatory actions. The SEC has jurisdiction over CDO managers,and enforces rules against securities manipulation, among other violations. The letter does not use the words “inquiry” or “investigation.”

Interviews with market participants and former regulators point to several areas that the SEC might be investigating. Some managers had their own in-house investment funds and may have taken positions that were in conflict with those of the investors in the structures that they managed. In some cases, their hedge funds may have bet against the very slices of the securities they were managing on behalf of the investors in the structure.

Underwriting investment banks often had influence over the investment choices some CDO managers made, giving rise to another possible conflict of interest. The agency may be looking at whether that influence was proper or not.

“The possibility for conflicts and self-dealing is huge,” says Turner, the former SEC chief accountant.

To date, the agency has little to show for its probes into the causes of the crisis that engulfed global financial markets just over a year ago. In June 2007, Christopher Cox, then the SEC chairman, testified before Congress that the agency had “about 12 investigations” under way concerning CDOs and collateralized loan obligations and similar products. A little more than a year later, Cox told Congress that the number of investigations into the financial industry, including the subprime mortgage origination business, had ballooned to over 50 separate inquiries.

There could be multiple reasons why investigations are proceeding slowly. Such cases are complex and require enormous resources and expertise.  Regulators also face the hurdle of proving intent to defraud.

Under Cox’s stewardship, the SEC fell into disarray , and it was harshly criticized by Congress and its own inspector general, particularly for its failure to catch the Ponzi scheme of Bernie Madoff.  The turnover of the new administration, which ushered in new leadership at the much-criticized agency, has also likely slowed efforts. In recent months, under new Chairman Mary Schapiro, the SEC has made insider-trading inquiries a high priority.

So far, there have been few indictments or civil complaints. In a sign of how long these cases can take, the mortgage company New Century Financial Corporation disclosed in March 2007 that it was the subject of an SEC investigation into possible insider stock sales and accounting irregularities. It wasn’t until last week --  Dec. 7 -- that the SEC filed a formal complaint against former executives of the company. The government’s highest-profile prosecution involving the financial collapse – the case against two managers of the Bear Stearns hedge fund for alleged securities and wire fraud – failed to gain a conviction when a jury decided that the men were simply bad businessmen rather than criminals.

Were you involved in the CDO business in the latter stages of the boom? We want to talk to you. E-mail us at CDOS@propublica.org or call us at (917) 512-0258.