Female Founder Secrets: Fertility • Hacker News Board

Re: Female Founder Secrets: Fertility

#451

Post by vbtemp » Thu, Mar 04, 2021, 9:47 PM UTC

tomcam wrote: post #435

astan wrote: post #67

Your whole blog resonates deeply with me. All this corporate grifting and women's empowerment months will do jack shit until we figure out how to make workplaces and lives more equitable for mothers and allowing for gaps, breaks and destigmatizing time off for parents of both genders. Instead, we talk about how sexism is the biggest problem. Sure, sexism might be annoying, but in the west, it is hardly something that…

Thanks. This is something dudes can't write about. My wife & I simply decided decades ago that one of us would always not work. We lived cheaply so we could accomplish that goal, but we wanted a good family life. I would have been happy to be a househusband because she's about 50 times the programmer I am, but she doesn't love business and I do. We ended up doing great, but we had to start out assuming that a 2-caree…

> It would have been nice if the popular press had been a little more honest about the biology

You are not alone with this sentiment.

Some years ago, in my 20s/early 30s-something friend groups, any time the topic of declining female fertility with age came up, it was basically attacked as fake news and a conspiracy by older, conservative family members to get them to breed.

Moreover, sex education in school was 110% about all the wonderful ways you can avoid getting pregnant.

As I reflect back on it, no one calmly, but firmly gave the message that female fertility (in particular) is neither a given nor to be taken for granted, and that sooner than you expect it drops to zero. Beyond that point, it can only be extended by extremely expensive, painful medical procedures, and even then there is no guarantee.

----

Edit: Another thing that comes to mind is that women have it really tough, in a lot of ways, and this one feels the most relevant.

I think for women, people close to you and people who you don't even know seem to take particular interest in the choices you make with your body: How you dress, how you do your makeup, who you sleep with, who you date, what you do for work, etc etc etc. Infinitely more so than with men. I think with all that going on, for young women, discussions of female fertility just feel like yet another way people are sticking their noses in her business while telling her whats best and sapping her autonomy. And I think that's why to lots of friends groups with lots of 20-something women this all feels like fake news and sinister.

Re: Female Founder Secrets: Fertility

#452

Post by cutemonster » Thu, Mar 04, 2021, 9:48 PM UTC

drakonka wrote: post #40

rantwasp wrote: post #3

I empathize with how hard it is for a female founder in particular and for a woman in general when it comes to mixing children with a career. That said the advice to freeze your eggs (ie work now, live later) rubs me the wrong way. I wish we could live in a society where people would not have to work themselves to death and were able to... you know... enjoy life

I think in some places society does work with this at least reasonably well, at least from the perspective of employees - I'm sure this is harder for startup founders. But I think that startup founders are in the minority, whereas the child-raising discourse usually touches on all kinds of professionals, including normal employees. Where I live it is common for both parents to take long stretches of leave to be with…

What's a TD?

> The replacement producer was simply moved to work on another project.

I wonder about the theoretical situation when the replacement did a significantly better job, and you needed just one person for that job role.

Then, I wonder if there could be some resentment when the original less talented person returns and "kicks out" the more talented one.

Maybe a solution is to not be too attached to the company and how it's going, and have a life outside work, hmm. And just not care

> fostering a culture where no one person is absolutely pivotal to the project

That sounds good. Maybe could even be a good thing to practice project leader rotation, without anyone going for parental leave

Re: Female Founder Secrets: Fertility

#453

Post by evnc » Thu, Mar 04, 2021, 9:48 PM UTC

jpm_sd wrote: post #143

austincheney wrote: post #7

The only logical answer here is youth. The younger you are the more fertile you are. This is true for both men and women, but more true for women. If you want children at some point in life then prioritize children first and early. I know, this puts your ambitious career on hold for a while and start ups require huge ambition. Still, start up opportunities will not be hyper critically different in the future than the…

I wonder if "children raised mostly by their grandparents" will start to become more common. There's been a rise in multi-generational households lately due to pandemic shifts. Maybe younger parents who are also clawing their way up the career ladder will be able to take advantage of this situation to offload some parenting to their own parents, and then pay it forward when their own kids have children later on? Migh…

I kinda wish it would. Anecdotally, as a dual income household grandparental assistance was indispensable in raising our baby, and I've sorely missed it since the pandemic hit and no one's visiting any more. I recognize how lucky we were to have that available, since not everyone does.

I think it can also have great benefits for the grandparents, who find a new sense of fulfillment and purpose and something to fill their time later in life. It reminds me of the studies on combining preschools and nursing homes showing positive outcomes for both populations. Also, intuitively, multi-generational households were the norm throughout human history before industrialization and economic centralization encouraged "leave your family behind and go Seek Your Fortune".

Re: Female Founder Secrets: Fertility

#454

Post by barrkel » Thu, Mar 04, 2021, 9:48 PM UTC

jxramos wrote: post #437

JPKab wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Women across all income demographics desire men who make as much or more than them. It's a fundamental preference that OKCupid identified a long time ago. As a man, I don't fault this. The risk to a man of reproducing with a woman who isn't great at making money isn't as high, at a fundamental level, as it is for women. A man isn't incapacitated in any way by the act of reproducing. Nor is he prevented or blocked out…

> Biology is brutal and doesn't care about fairness or morality. I still try to meditate on the evolutionary advances for sexual vs asexual reproduction to begin with. There's got to be a huge advantage of the separation of the sexes that is hard to fathom just because it's everywhere. Is it a springboard of genetic diversity that optimizes in ways we can't imagine otherwise? The 'compared to what' is always somethin…

If you have advantageous mutations in two parallel family trees, sexual reproduction permits them to join into a single tree while asexual (splitting) doesn't. There's a similar effect for eliminating harmful mutations that coincide with beneficial mutations.

It's more complex in practice for bacteria - there can be DNA transmitted horizontally - but bacteria usually win out by sheer numbers.

Re: Female Founder Secrets: Fertility

#455

Post by JPKab » Thu, Mar 04, 2021, 9:50 PM UTC

jacobolus wrote: post #445

JPKab wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a father who had his first child at 23 years of age, the corporate/SV world is just AWFUL to women who don't want to have to rely on IVF to have kids. And often the worst perpetrators of said awfulness are other women who themselves are delaying having kids. They have sacrificed, and really don't like the women who they view as "not making the same sacrifice". It's all around just awful to pit human biology agains…

Your comment would be a lot more effective if it didn't suggest that women's rights activists only care about landing jobs at Google and are "absolutely corrupt". The sentences linking identical twins to "twisted and toxic" are also weird. There are some kernels of insight there, but this is not a remotely accurate characterization of any of the women's rights activists I have ever met, and it largely comes across to…

I’m a twin. How you read that as me calling twins twisted and toxic is rather confusing to me. It was obvious that I was referring to the system that forces these delays in reproduction.

Re: Female Founder Secrets: Fertility

#456

Post by depressedpanda » Thu, Mar 04, 2021, 9:50 PM UTC

vecplane wrote: post #319

bradleybuda wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You shouldn't refrigerate your food. It's risky and unnatural. For the first 300,000 years of human history, people got along fine without refrigeration - why don't you just hunt and gather like you were intended to? IVF, egg and embryo freezing, and related technologies are modern miracles that allow people to live better lives by increasing their fertility options.

That's an obvious false equivalence. While technically 'unnatural' refrigeration is not 'invasive and risky.' The vast majority of pre-modern humans were likely starving or malnourished, and those problems are mostly solved in the modern era, thanks in part to refrigeration. We don't really have good solutions for women trying to have children into their 40s, though I fully support the advancement of fertility techno…

> The vast majority of pre-modern humans were likely starving or malnourished, and those problems are mostly solved in the modern era, thanks in part to refrigeration.

What makes you think that? I find it more likely that early hominids fared about as well as contemporary chimpanzees. Some starving, some being malnourished, but definitely not a vast majority.

Re: Female Founder Secrets: Fertility

#457

Post by asoneth » Thu, Mar 04, 2021, 9:51 PM UTC

dcow wrote: post #211

astan wrote: post #67

Your whole blog resonates deeply with me. All this corporate grifting and women's empowerment months will do jack shit until we figure out how to make workplaces and lives more equitable for mothers and allowing for gaps, breaks and destigmatizing time off for parents of both genders. Instead, we talk about how sexism is the biggest problem. Sure, sexism might be annoying, but in the west, it is hardly something that…

> When I mention it to someone that I want to take time off for a couple years to have children in silicon valley, they look at me as if I'm an alien. As if wanting to be pregnant and not working at the same time as being sleep deprived and wanting to spend time with my own baby when they are at their youngest is some strange outlandish fantasy. And this happens way more than people lead on and for the exact BS reaso…

Of more than a dozen friends who moved to Silicon Valley for work/education, all but one left California around the time they started their families. The impression I get is that they're happy they had a chance to work there for a decade or so and now they're happy to live somewhere else. Silicon Valley sounds like a great place to do many things and it's OK if having a family is not one of those things. I'm not saying it's not possible -- one of my friends is making a go of it. But it does sound like having a family there is playing on Hard Mode.

Contrast that to NYC where most of the folks I know who started families there still work in the city, though some did move a little further out into the suburbs.

Re: Female Founder Secrets: Fertility

#458

Post by StillBored » Thu, Mar 04, 2021, 9:53 PM UTC

supergirl wrote: post #415

StillBored wrote: post #403

Why is this specific to females? This happens to males indirectly. Unless your fabulously wealthy and can basically hire a 25 Y/O wife/Surrogate Mother, most men have steadily declining chance to have a child as they get older too. Simply because the available pool of fertile females willing to have a child with them is declining. That is not even to mention actual biological problems that make men functionally infer…

I think it's implied that it's easier for men to have children and not drop the ball on the career; so they don't need to wait until they are old. A newborn is a much bigger disruption for the mother than the father. This is biological but also cultural (e.g. in some EU countries only women get a months long paid vacation after birth).

Maybe.. OTOH, in the US it seems the common expectation these days it that men pull their weight when it comes to raising children. God knows I would have gotten divorced if I continued to work till 10PM leaving my wife at home with a young child.

Which maybe, if the man is ok with biologically having a child they see a couple times a month that works, otherwise most men are going to be up feeding the baby all night long too, and picking them up from school, staying home to take care of them when they are sick.

So, just the split work/family focus is going to remove most men from the competition to be top dog at the office unless they are successful enough, and can find a women willing to be a housewife.

Women can probably pull this off in reverse if they are successful enough, and find an "artist" or someone already outside of the traditional male career paths too. Biologically its not unheard of for women to work until their due date and then return to work in a week or so, leaving the child with a caregiver (frequently an aging parent/etc).

Of course if she wants to participate in the child's upbringing the split focus issues will likely arise too.

Hence my comment that to imagine this is strictly a female problem is an oversimplification. Yes, the problems are slightly different, but to imagine a man can work his way up to some level of success and then find a younger woman willing to be a housewife to a 20 year older man is a risky proposition too.

Re: Female Founder Secrets: Fertility

#459

Post by gonehome » Thu, Mar 04, 2021, 9:54 PM UTC

zippergz wrote: post #387

dcow wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When I mention it to someone that I want to take time off for a couple years to have children in silicon valley, they look at me as if I'm an alien. As if wanting to be pregnant and not working at the same time as being sleep deprived and wanting to spend time with my own baby when they are at their youngest is some strange outlandish fantasy. And this happens way more than people lead on and for the exact BS reaso…

I have a lot of friends in SF. At least in the tech industry, it seems that the main reason people live in SF despite the significant downsides is for career options and pay. So I'd guess that the SF dating pool is already strongly skewed to people who choose career over all else.

The bay area M/F ratio is extremely skewed and the dating market is extremely competitive - (has way too many men).

I would guess that in cities with high skew (in either direction) this creates a disincentive to staying together for one person in the relationship.

I'd also guess the NIMBYs and extreme housing cost also incentivize delaying things.

If there was a lot of housing supply the financial risk of having kids would be way lower.

Re: Female Founder Secrets: Fertility

#460

Post by dang » Thu, Mar 04, 2021, 9:55 PM UTC

JPKab wrote: post #392

dcow wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When I mention it to someone that I want to take time off for a couple years to have children in silicon valley, they look at me as if I'm an alien. As if wanting to be pregnant and not working at the same time as being sleep deprived and wanting to spend time with my own baby when they are at their youngest is some strange outlandish fantasy. And this happens way more than people lead on and for the exact BS reaso…

As a father who had his first child at 23 years of age, the corporate/SV world is just AWFUL to women who don't want to have to rely on IVF to have kids. And often the worst perpetrators of said awfulness are other women who themselves are delaying having kids. They have sacrificed, and really don't like the women who they view as "not making the same sacrifice". It's all around just awful to pit human biology agains…

I appreciate your posting about your personal experience but your comment also crosses into an ideological flamewar rant and we don't want those here. Please stick to the former and edit out the latter in the future.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html