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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

#101

Post by gcheong »

Watermelon wrote: post #99
Jun8 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you've got it wrong. I think the point he was trying top make is the time management aspect (as parents know, kids are a huge time sink, god bless'em). I've got only one, and he's making it extremely hard to put extra time on anything. So, actually having N kids is nothing to boast about, doing so while being able to do anything meaningful is.

I know a medical doctor who had 14 kids (oh, those catholics). And she still managed to practise medicine when she was not spreading her legs to launch another baby in this world. Sounds much more impressive than managing a baseball team, imho. The OP wants the HN crowd to assure him of what a special and unique snowflake his sister is, when she's merely doing something that is the norm in some parts of the world.

In families with such large numbers of kids, it seems it is often the older kids who at some point start to be charged with looking after the younger ones so, yeah it's "doable" but the parents aren't doing it all.

Re: Women Don't Want To Run Startups Because They'd Rather Have Children

#102

Post by antileet »

Watermelon wrote: post #99
Jun8 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you've got it wrong. I think the point he was trying top make is the time management aspect (as parents know, kids are a huge time sink, god bless'em). I've got only one, and he's making it extremely hard to put extra time on anything. So, actually having N kids is nothing to boast about, doing so while being able to do anything meaningful is.

I know a medical doctor who had 14 kids (oh, those catholics). And she still managed to practise medicine when she was not spreading her legs to launch another baby in this world. Sounds much more impressive than managing a baseball team, imho. The OP wants the HN crowd to assure him of what a special and unique snowflake his sister is, when she's merely doing something that is the norm in some parts of the world.

"Intellectual pursuits are more respectable and rewarding than non-intellectual ones". Personally, I'd say it might be okay to run a little baseball team and make a few dozen people's lives more interesting. Even doing a phd in QFT, as you note, might help some people in the long run. But are you trying to define a heuristic that proposes that one human is better than the other solely due to the field of work?

I find this trend rather disturbing. It's almost parallel to the "nerds don't get laid" paradigm. For the record, I'm a physics major. And I'd any-day prefer to be a little-league team manager than troll on comment threads.

Re: Women Don't Want To Run Startups Because They'd Rather Have Children

#103

Post by qeorge »

I'd love to hear the author say this to the women in my family with a straight face.

- My mother and her best friend (also a woman) started a business last year (her 2nd), and she's looking at starting a third.

- My stepmother founded/runs a non-profit (her 2nd or 3rd, not sure).

- My sister declared she wanted to be a dean at age 18. 12 years and 3 degrees later, she's now a dean at American.

- All 4 of my aunts run their own businesses, three have done several and the fourth started hers this week. One currently owns/runs one of the larger companies in Germany.

Anecdotal evidence be damned!

Re: Women Don't Want To Run Startups Because They'd Rather Have Children

#104

Post by untamedmedley »

Had this article been written by a man, people would zero in immediately on Penelope's real issue:

She is trying to blame her failure on being a woman.

She's started several startups, and each time has failed to create anything that matched her original entrepreneurial dreams. Unfortunately, because this is such a hot topic in tech, and it "verifies" (with purely anecdotal evidence) many people's biases on the issue, people aren't even pointing this out.

I'm calling BS. Trunk is looking for an excuse to explain why her failures aren't her fault (Biology). Instead of writing a meaningful postmortem on how difficult entrepreneurship can be, we get this tripe that's supposed to apply to all (or most) women. Nevermind that there are women in a variety of incredibly demanding professions with children.

Beyond that, I really don't get this notion that you have to be in your children's faces every moment of the day in order for them to be well-adjusted. There's a huge difference between parenting/discipline and hovering/coddling.

Re: Women Don't Want To Run Startups Because They'd Rather Have Children

#105

Post by ewjordan »

ramanujan wrote: post #98
ewjordan wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An evolutionary argument could be made that it's because a man that does extremely risky things (like, say, sleeping with every woman that he is able to) can spread his genes far and wide as a reward for such behavior (he'll have a lot of children). Whereas a woman engaging in the same behaviors can only be have one child every nine months, and for most of human history, every pregnancy carried with it a high risk of…

I encourage you to write this up, as it is a fairly novel take on potentially quantitatively testing evolutionary psychology theories one way or the other. Do you have an email or contact info? If you write me at the email in my profile I could put you in touch with some senior population geneticists who I'm sure would be interested.

I have absolutely no idea whether any of this is new or not, I'm a complete novice to bio and evo psych. For the most part I've been exclusively focused on taking inspiration from what seems to work in natural evolution as a guide to improving genetic methods in programming, so I haven't really thought too much about drawing conclusions from the real world (an unfortunate side effect of majoring in math, the real world seems so mundane :P ).

Re: writing something up, I'll add it to my todo list, hopefully it will happen eventually, though I'm fairly slow at more formal writing... I am planning to do a series of posts on evolutionary methods in programming, where I want to cover (and hopefully prove useful) a lot of biologically inspired things usually left out of vanilla genetic algorithms/programming (speciation, gender, chromosome/gene separations, automatic evolution of coding schemes, embeddings of meta-evolutionary abilities within the normal evolution process, and hopefully more), but I'm lagging on actually trying out all the things I'd like to, and I also want to find some more compelling practical uses for this stuff...can't make any promises, this is currently a total side-project for me, but I'm plugging away at it, so I'll do my best to write it up eventually. I'll start thinking more about what might be possible to infer from real DNA; my brother is working on his bio-informatics PhD and I've had a lot of conversations with him about this type of thing, so I know that some of the stuff they're able to pull out of the data is truly incredible, they very well may have the data necessary to answer questions about fixation speeds in each chromosome, which would be extremely interesting whatever the results were.

Sent you an e-mail, and added info to my profile (didn't realize that it wasn't already available from the e-mail field, that should be more clear IMO) - if you really think any of this is worth pursuing, by all means let me know.

Re: Women Don't Want To Run Startups Because They'd Rather Have Children

#107

Post by ars »

gcheong wrote: post #101
Watermelon wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know a medical doctor who had 14 kids (oh, those catholics). And she still managed to practise medicine when she was not spreading her legs to launch another baby in this world. Sounds much more impressive than managing a baseball team, imho. The OP wants the HN crowd to assure him of what a special and unique snowflake his sister is, when she's merely doing something that is the norm in some parts of the world.

In families with such large numbers of kids, it seems it is often the older kids who at some point start to be charged with looking after the younger ones so, yeah it's "doable" but the parents aren't doing it all.

It's not just that - the younger kids always have a playmate, so it's not necessary for the parent to do that.

You rarely hear "I'm bored" when you have 5 kids in the house all of around the same age.

Re: Women Don't Want To Run Startups Because They'd Rather Have Children

#108

Post by ewjordan »

lars wrote: post #73
ewjordan wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An evolutionary argument could be made that it's because a man that does extremely risky things (like, say, sleeping with every woman that he is able to) can spread his genes far and wide as a reward for such behavior (he'll have a lot of children). Whereas a woman engaging in the same behaviors can only be have one child every nine months, and for most of human history, every pregnancy carried with it a high risk of…

I've been sitting here thinking about this for ~20 minutes now. I'm about 70% sure you're onto something useful. Seems like it could be a nice way to do the trade-off between population variation and selection pressure.

The trick is, the optimal trade-off between variation and selection pressure is highly dependent on the problem domain (selecting to maintain variation is great when navigating a broad fitness landscape with many sparsely distributed peaks of different sizes, whereas strong selection pressure is best when climbing to the top of one of those peaks). I'd ideally like to pick out a way to embed this trade-off inside the evolutionary process itself, so that individual selection could implicitly seek out a good balance between variation and hill-climbing, based on the current complexity of the problem being solved. I think allowing for some sort of speciation (to some extent, speciation boils down to running natural selection on groups of naturally selected individuals - the recursive possibilities are clear, here, though I don't know if they're useful) as well as allowing the genetic material to (in some manner) specify how it "uses up" its fitness is one approach to this, but I haven't settled yet, that approach still seems a bit ad hoc to me and I'd really like to find a more natural way to achieve something similar.

As a rule, I definitely think that playing with the rules of evolution, and more specifically, letting those rules (perhaps implicitly) evolve themselves, will be a key idea if we want to exploit evolution for all it's worth; finding a way to let the process significantly improve itself is, IMO, the Holy Grail of evolutionary computing. Evolution is, in some sense, a process of emergence that's been optimized by emergence, and I suspect that our best shot at creating intelligence may be to follow that pattern and attempt to achieve an evolutionary process that's optimized by evolution.

What results when you have intelligence optimized by intelligence is another matter, and (IMO) a far more dangerous one, but that's another story for another day...

Re: Women Don't Want To Run Startups Because They'd Rather Have Children

#109

Post by ewjordan »

_delirium wrote: post #42
ewjordan wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 gon…

Another interesting comparison, IMO, is to banking and finance, where the atmosphere is even more distinctly "big swinging dick", yet the gender ratio is still not as imbalanced as in IT (IIRC, the ratios in finance are more like 65:35, whereas in IT it's somewhere around 80:20 or maybe even worse, depending what sector of IT).

This is one of the main reasons I don't buy the argument that women stay away because men are assholes in tech: the men I've interacted with that are in finance put the worst of the IT douchebags to shame when it comes to misogyny (the guys in the money fields often really hate women, or at least have no respect for them, whereas in tech, they just don't really interact with than many women, so most things tend to be male-centric, I rarely see actual hostility), yet women work in that field far more readily than they do in tech.

I'm sure the remunerative aspects play some role here; it's pretty easy to get rich if you can make it through hell-year at a hedge fund, whereas being code-monkey #8 at some random startup is likely to do little more than pay the bills for another year or two.

But still, you'd think any financial disincentives would apply equally to men and women.

I definitely think there's something else going on here, and it seems to have a lot to do with interest, not incentives or disincentives. To me, the main question is whether the interest discrepancy is cause by an innate difference between men and women (for whatever reason, men like building stuff, writing code, solving problems or whatever, and women don't) or a social one (men are encouraged to do it, women aren't).

Given that I ended up in this field with pretty much zero influence from anyone (I started messing around with APL when I was about 8 and found the executable while poking around for games on my dad's computer), and to this day I've met a grand total of maybe 4 females that were interested enough to learn to program at all, as compared to hundreds of males, I'm skeptical of claims that it's purely social, the numbers are just too extreme for that if the same natural urges exist in all of us.

Re: Women Don't Want To Run Startups Because They'd Rather Have Children

#110

Post by dejb »

mklg1266 wrote: post #89
pbhjpbhj wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>we're talking about a field in which there are demonstrably fewer women participating than men and we're asking why I'd like to ask why you imagine that in any field there would be equal numbers of men and women? Or indeed why there should be any reason beyond simple preference. More women like milk chocolate; more men like dark (pulled that one out my arse incidentally). Does it matter? If you take a gender blind v…

"I'd like to ask why you imagine that in any field there would be equal numbers of men and women? Or indeed why there should be any reason beyond simple preference." Listen: "Women are choosing not to as a matter of preference so there's nothing wrong" is a cop-out. I'll grant you that the reason for the lack of equality is "simple preference." Clearly, because if women "wanted" to do startups/tech, they would. There…

> But if we start from the assumption that gender shouldn't matter

There's your problem. By using the word "shouldn't" you seem to be conflating "our best guess at objective reality" with "what we think would be morally correct". It is unfortunate that thinking like this is still allowed to infest some higher educational institutions but it doesn't cut the mustard when nobody's funding is on the line.

In terms of objective reality this assumption is unwarranted. There are significant documented differences between the distributions of intellectual capabilities of genders including the higher variance in IQ for men and men's aptitude skew towards maths and away from language.

> In the past, simple, personality/preference/constitution-based explanations for gender discrepancies have proven false many times - women didn't have the constitutions to be doctors, women didn't have the temperament to be lawyers, etc etc - so I'm inclined to distrust this sort of explanation, at least initially.

In the 70s, 80s and even 90s this would have made more sense. But as the years of higher university attendance of women stretch out, as women continue to succeed in previously male dominated areas such as medicine and law you have to ask 'why not in tech/CS/startups'. It isn't as if it is a area that has ever been reputed as having a history of institution chauvinism. To me, the weight of evidence points more and more towards the differences in distributions of capabilities and preferences between genders playing a significant part in participation rates in tech. However much of an 'Inconvenient Likelihood' this may be for both the tech industry and many women, it shouldn't blind us to evaluating the evidence as objectively as possible.

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