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Female Founder Secrets: Fertility

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Re: Female Founder Secrets: Fertility

#261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you deny the existence of men and women who choose not to have children?

Please go out and meet people, men, women, in real life. People go through phases. Little children think they are dinosaurs and have pretend tea parties. I’ve known several women that said they didn’t ever want kids, while dating loser college boyfriends. However, when the same women met and married successful, richer, older men, the women popped out babies left and right. People say things all the time to rationaliz…

> Please go out and meet people, men, women, in real life.

That's horrible advice, we're in a pandemic. But when it's over I would highly suggest taking your own advice. If you are really discussing in good faith and genuinely have never met or heard of a person who has chosen to go through life without having kids, to the point of legitimately not believing that such people even exist, it sounds like your world has been very small. I wish you the best of luck with expanding it.

Re: Female Founder Secrets: Fertility

#262
post #231
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…

It's not clear what you're asking for exactly, but the solution is obvious: give whatever it is that you want to provide to EVERYONE, regardless of their gender, and whether or not they actually have children. Special treatment for everyone.

This is a nice sentiment, but doing so would have unintended consequences.

For example, in most top universities, they give roughly the same leave to new fathers as new mothers. New mothers use this time to care for their baby, but many new fathers use this time as an extended sabbatical/research leave. Their wives take care of the baby for the most part, and they work on their next book.

Then when it comes time for tenure review, the men who did this have accomplished more than they would have if they hadn't had kids (and more than some faculty who are mothers, who spent their leave with their baby).

So when everyone gets the same treatment, that doesn't necessarily reduce or eliminate disparities — and in some cases it can exacerbate them.

Re: Female Founder Secrets: Fertility

#263

The down stream effects of our system could be that the successful, educated, intelligent women and men dont have children, and the more aggressive, more risk taking, less educated among us have many children. This has the potential to massively harm our society in the long term. We need to ascribe virtue to having children. We need to ascribe an extremely high amount of virtue to being a good parent.

I think it's pretty well documented this is already happening.

People with less education have more children, on average, than people with more education.

Re: Female Founder Secrets: Fertility

#264

Wait, why is the advice to 'do something invasive, risky, and unnatural' when the actual advice should be 'have children when you're younger, not older.'

Because that would violate the “I want to have my cake and eat it too” mantra. “I want to make massive life altering choices and suffer no 2nd order effects.” “I want to handicap others to compensate for my decisions” It’s selfish, unfair, and morally wrong. When did the smart way of doing things in alignment with nature, become old, antiquated, and dumb? I find the ignorant snobbishness of our modern world to be ins…

Because society actively punishes people who do so. If having a child in your twenties is career suicide, it's only natural that people who aren't willing to give up their career prospects to have a child (would you?) will try to postpone it.

Re: Female Founder Secrets: Fertility

#265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like part of the problem is the obsession in media and social circles with young success. I see lists like Forbes 30 under 30, 40 under 40, and the celebration of young billionaires who are worshipped and held up as the example of what high performers should strive to be, and its quite unhealthy. I wish there were more stories about people who found success in their 40's, 50's and beyond, especially the ones w…

Yeah, but those people are the one-in-100-million types. Most people have lack-luster careers in their 20s, which pick up in their 30s and peak in their 40s-50s. It makes a lot of sense for the average person to prioritize family building in their early 20s so that the kids are more self-sufficient right at the time where your career is taking off. Plus, if your blessed enough to have parents who can help out, having…

> It makes a lot of sense for the average person to prioritize family building in their early 20s

I'd say it used to make sense before the late 1970's when wages started stagnating. As the gap has grown the average person in their early 20's has to struggle to afford to pay for their own basic needs, much less trying to afford to have kids. Once their career is starting to pick up in their 30s they finally have the financial situation to start considering kids.

Re: Female Founder Secrets: Fertility

#266

Wait, why is the advice to 'do something invasive, risky, and unnatural' when the actual advice should be 'have children when you're younger, not older.'

Because your actual advice also implicitly includes a 'just give up on having a career' part.

Re: Female Founder Secrets: Fertility

#267
post #178

Its interesting I had a friend who got pregnant at University. I thought it would be ruinous to their career but maybe its a better solution. When she was 40 her child was already an adult and she could fully concentrate on working.

It depends what type of business you want to go into. If you're aiming for high finance/law/management/acting, it's improbable to get into without following the normal formula.

Agreed, but that is like 0.1% of all people.

Re: Female Founder Secrets: Fertility

#268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't agree with this take. IVF live birth rates are something like 30% of implantations. e.g. see https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7139227/ . The article you're linking even says that Winston is using the wrong number, and spends most of its time explaining why he's wrong; > Lord Winston's 1% figure was referring to the proportion of all frozen eggs thawed for use in fertility treatment which result in…

The extraction process will gather something like 10 eggs (plus or minus a lot)... Isn't 10 minus "a lot", close to or equal to 0? Or is there something I'm missing with this phrasing?

Perhaps I was being overly flippant as I don't have the precise distribution. I'm sure it could be zero, I don't know how often that is though. A quick Google gives 10-20 on average:

https://www.arcfertility.com/how-is-ivf-done-step-by-step/#:....

Re: Female Founder Secrets: Fertility

#269
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…

> I wish the world wasn't so male centric, that feminists actually cared about finding structural solutions instead of forcing women to become copies of men to achieve gender parity

What is happening is destroying both men and women in their roles: sure, men can have their great enjoyment at the male and performance centric workplace, but providing for a family is also part of being a man, and it's being ignored. Sexual life of most men is in a strong decline.

Sadly man hating and women hating increased together (according to Google trends), and more and more relationships are just transactional.

Re: Female Founder Secrets: Fertility

#270

I'm not so sure freezing eggs is sound advice. Lord Winston, who is professor of fertility studies at Imperial College London, warned that it was "a very unsuccessful technology" and said: "The number of eggs that actually result in a pregnancy after freezing is about 1%." He later clarified he was referring to live births. https://www.bbc.com/news/health-51463488#:~:text=Lord%20Wins... . “It’s not like I would disco…

A 2018 study [1] showed that kids conceived via IVF had abnormal arterial development. IIRC, teenagers had arteries that were as stiff as an average 40-year-old.

1: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6815705/

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