There are still questions about nature vs nurture. There are lots of social pressures to be a certain kind of woman, a certain kind of mom, etc. I'm not sure any of her examples prove that things are biologically this way, just that they are. I wish she would just ask the questions, and not answer them. Why aren't men full partners in parenting? Who's fault is that? Why aren't young women encouraged to take on greater risks in their lives? Is it really true that you can only have a successful start-up if you surround yourself with exploitable young men who will work long hours for a minimal payoff?
Women Don't Want To Run Startups Because They'd Rather Have Children
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Re: Women Don't Want To Run Startups Because They'd Rather Have Children
#42From the headline, I was hoping this involved some research, some sort of new finding, at least with tentative causality ("because" is hard to prove, but there is evidence that is more persuasive and less persuasive). But it's just someone's opinion based on anecdotes. And it's not really a new one: the "women do more/less of X because they want to have a family" argument is written about all the time . It vies with…
Agreed, this is pretty much a shallow version of the same argument that many people have been making for quite some time now. It would also seem to suggest that we should see major shortages of women in other fields that are extremely intense to start out in (medicine and law, for instance), and IIRC the gender ratios there are much more balanced. "Working hard" is not something women tend to be put off by; "building…
The comparison to law/medicine is particularly interesting, and I haven't seen a good explanation of the differences with that (one might exist, but I haven't found it). My feeling is that 20-30 years ago, computing, law, and medicine were all seen as being fairly similar gender-wise, both in terms of their ratios and perceptions of how friendly/attractive to women the fields were. But in the years since, they've gone in opposite directions: women now make up more than half of med-school students, and an ever-increasing proportion of law-school students, but they make up a smaller portion of CS students today than they did in the 1980s.
Re: Women Don't Want To Run Startups Because They'd Rather Have Children
#43This seems like much more of a cultural phenomenon than a biological one.
Re: Women Don't Want To Run Startups Because They'd Rather Have Children
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not necessarily. Birthrates in developed countries where resources are plentiful and infant mortality rates are low tend downward, not upward. Our species has adopted the strategy that it is better to put more resources into fewer offspring than the shot-gunning approach. We only need to maintain replacement levels or slightly above to be self-sustaining.
Apart from isolated examples in certain countries I don't think the world as a whole has much to worry about in maintaining replacement levels.
6,873,900,000 and counting... (continuous growth since the Black Death around the year 1400)
Re: Women Don't Want To Run Startups Because They'd Rather Have Children
#45"Running a startup" and "being in tech" are very different things. It's totally possible to work in tech without running a startup, so if her thesis is correct you'd expect women engineers to be equally represented in medium to large tech companies and under-represented at startups. Instead, they are vanishingly rare at both.
So I don't buy it. One datapoint does not yield a conclusion.
Re: Women Don't Want To Run Startups Because They'd Rather Have Children
#46Oh my, the extrapolation is making my brain shrink!
Re: Women Don't Want To Run Startups Because They'd Rather Have Children
#47Hey, a child IS a startup...and you can't be risk averse to create one.
Re: Women Don't Want To Run Startups Because They'd Rather Have Children
#48The internet has actually enabled a whole generation of female entrepreneurs to 'do their start-up thing' and have children to boot. It's the perfect tool to have a company and be around the house all day long (or as long as you want to be), I'm not exactly female but I would have found it very hard to decide for children if I had been a person with a 9 to 5 job. If you and your spouse can work together on a start-up…
Yup. Didn't we only yesterday have an Ask HN thread on side projects that are making money?
The great thing about software today is how much you can do on a small scale. If her theory about commitment was correct, you would have a bunch of women who had started small side projects and then said "oh this has really taken off and I don't want to work 100 hours a week so I want to sell it". Where are they then?
I am pretty convinced that the answer is a lot simpler and is simply related to the number of women who code in the first place.
Re: Women Don't Want To Run Startups Because They'd Rather Have Children
#49I generally find the use of "never" interesting.
There was a time when I never wanted to work in tech because of what my parents went through. How fun could working for 12 hours a day, 6-7 days a week be? Not all that fun. Now, I work in tech. I guess I was wrong.
I was a toys'r'us kid. I didn't ever want to grow up. When I hit 27, I changed my mind. I guess I was wrong.
Today, I never want to have kids. But I've felt this with many things - many more than I mention here, most of which I've likely long forgotten. Instead, I tell my girlfriend that I don't think I want to have kids, but can't promise anything. Previous experience with the term proves it a rather dubious conclusion. Afterall, never is a long time.
Re: Women Don't Want To Run Startups Because They'd Rather Have Children
#50I do wish women with a chip on their shoulders would stop getting all aggro about observations that are not prescriptions . You saying "that's not true" is just as globalizing as "this is true." There is just something about women and product businesses that's weird. I recently put on a conference about bootstrapping paying products only, and I looked for ages to find a single woman bootstrapper like myself. They can…
I'd like you to talk to my friend Esther Flatto. She is working on a product called the Flip Slip. geuis.teses@gmail.com