Stop Telling Women To Do Startups

Yes, I basically agree.

"Would you like to be childless or give up your career?" is a sucky choice, and if we are going to force women to make it I believe it is only fair that men be forced to make it to.

In some sense, men are asked to make this choice and men fairly often choose career over children. This doesn't necessarily mean that they do not reproduce. My grown sons have no relationship to their father. I am divorced. Our sons live with me. At some point after they became legal adults, my oldest son clearly spelled out to his father that he didn't view him in parental/affectionate terms and please don't have an delusions in that regard. Their father stopped trying to contact them after that. We are okay with that.

Their dad poured himself into his career. He thought he was doing the right thing. I have no idea how he feels about his lack of relationship to the kids but he did in some sense make a choice between the two. The fact that women (and children) are getting screwed by our societal norms/policies does not prove men really have it much better.

We have incredibly complex apparatus in our brain with a dedicated purpose of socialization. Empathy, language, and cooperation are things which humans would not be capable of if we didn't evolve to do them.

There are other, more equitable ways to sustain civilization besides having the women stay at home and rear children but it would require sacrifice from men that honestly, most seem unwilling to make. Or worse, men aren't cognizant of the full extent of the sacrifices that their partners are making for the family.

I say this as a gay woman that has dated men and am finding negotiating responsibilities and compromises in a same-sex relationship eye-opening to the mostly hidden inequalities in the ways hetero partners relate to each other and divvy up responsibilities. It's the little things that add up -- the assumption about who will pick up the kids from day care [[if a child is in daycare, the parents are presumably both working.. but why are there so many more moms picking up the kids than dads?]], who does the grocery shopping that week, who does the laundry... the default is too often the woman. There might be men on HN that read this that are very good to their partners and try very hard to create an equitable household and feel that this comment is unfair or doesn't reflect their own home situations. That may be true, but the chances are that if you took a very careful accounting over time and paid attention, you'd see a pattern that skews toward particular heteronormative conventions. It's just incredibly hard not to let our society's very rigid and prevalent gender roles creep into our relationships. I have a friend who considers himself a feminist and he is the one that is more vocal and careful about sharing chores than his wife. Why does that seem so noteworthy and laudable? If things were really fair, shouldn't that be more normal?

And I say this understanding that it's not all gravy for men either -- the expectations that are associated with being a man are often unfair and also cause unhappiness. Honestly, though, when it comes to things like resource and opportunity distribution, these differences tend to favor men (for instance, there's evidence that gender roles and expectations play a big part in the salary disparity between men and women.) I'd say that's a major problem. The article's author says that many women would rather work part-time and raise children and find that a fulfilling life. That's wonderful. The question I'd like to raise is, if they had the opportunity to work full-time or even do something demanding like a startup and still feel like they had the time and energy to raise their children well (perhaps because their husbands are willing to work part-time and pitch in more toward raising the kids), would they rather take that option? And if so, what can we do as a society to help make that a reality?

Demanding that certain ideas be phrased in a politically correct way only serves the purpose of making it more difficult to express those ideas. If your goal is to suppress dissent that is valuable, but not if your goal is to find the truth. What is your goal?

If men are prone to stereotype threat in some area, then they too are inferior in that area. For example, if a "white men can't jump" stereotype prevents men from performing well in basketball, then men are indeed likely to be inferior basketball players. Similarly, in the non-scientific experiment you described, the brown-eyed children did appear to perform more poorly.

Obviously the inferiority only holds in a cultural context and in certain areas - mine referred to the modern American context, where apparently even marking [X] Female lowers women's performance on scientific topics. I probably should have expressed this more clearly in my original comment.

An interesting fact to realize is that the stereotype-threat based inferiority might be unavoidable. Suppose hypothetically that white men are shorter or worse jumpers (on average) than black men. In this case, the "white men can't jump" stereotype is true - but then knowledge of this true fact might cause them to also perform worse than their height would otherwise suggest due to stereotype threat. Human psychology might actually amplify innate differences in abilities.

And honestly, it's true -- being a woman in tech still sucks a lot of the time. You have to fight harder to get respect because you don't look like other competent engineers that people have come across. You have to prove yourself every time you meet someone new. You face skepticism that you wouldn't if you were a man (particularly a white guy.)

And I know this because I'm guilty of this too.