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Female Founder Secrets: Fertility

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Re: Female Founder Secrets: Fertility

#341

Post by centimeter »

random5634 wrote: post #236
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…

Yeah, my mom always rebelled at the feminist push to have women do men's work as the goal (without valuing work women already did). Join the military, kill people etc. I'm 100% for that, but it's crazy that a women doesn't get paid for raising kids, perhaps the most important thing for society and with INCREDIBLE costs (if done badly) and benefits (if done well) to everyone. What's even more interesting, upvalue work…

> it's crazy that a women doesn't get paid for raising kids

Because she already collects a massive amount of utility associated with raising her own children. The economics of paying people to raise their own children doesn't make sense; the externality allocations are completely wrong. I'm sure you can imagine some of the perverse incentives that come into play.

A woman benefits from raising her own kids (with an associated opportunity cost in employment availability), and the father also benefits from her raising the kids (without the same opportunity cost), so the rational economic strategy is for the father to defray some of the opportunity costs to the mother. This arrangement has existed for at least thousands of years and is called "marriage".

Re: Female Founder Secrets: Fertility

#343

Post by LeonardMenard »

TuringTest wrote: post #271
vbtemp wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think women have largely been presented a false promise by progressives There's a lot of sneering and judgment by women, toward women who choose to be a stay at home mom and not have a career.

The value behind that attitude is that it is a problem to think that women are the ones expected to choose staying-at-home, when culturally this expectation should be distributed equally among genders.

Yes, exactly. I am disappointed (but not sneering nor contemptuous) when I find out that another one of my well-educated and ambitious female peers has decided to become a stay-at-home mom. Not because I don't think it's a valuable or valid role to play, but because I have absolutely zero equivalent male peers who have done the same thing.

Another well-educated women who choose to give up her career and stay at home, without a corresponding man doing the same, is just another data point that makes MY career look invalid, and sees MY career as optional.

Like, more power to her, but it does make me sad at the state of society.

Re: Female Founder Secrets: Fertility

#344

Post by babesh »

retrac wrote: post #312
onetimeusename wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "equitable to mothers" > "actual equality where we acknowledge that women have different needs and desires". I can't see any other meaning besides equality of outcomes split across employees by fertility lines regardless of inputs. I think this is unfair. What do you tell someone who did not take X amount of time off when their outcome is equated with someone who did? Increasing paternity leave for all people doesn…

It's no less fair than me having to pay school taxes when I have no children. Healthy families and adequate children so the population pyramid doesn't implode (more of an issue in other developed countries than North America) is a pressing issue that affects everyone in those societies. We should pay our part of it.

My town exempts people over 55 from some school parcel taxes. That is because there needs to e a supermajority to pass bonds and exempting people who don’t have school age children makes them much easier to pass. There is a balance that needs to be reached here. If you take this to the extreme, I could have no children and work while my neighbor has 7 children and chooses not to work.

Re: Female Founder Secrets: Fertility

#345

Post by centimeter »

hksh wrote: post #274
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…

I agree with much of what you say except that "women have different needs". I would say each person has different needs and to divide into the male/female binary is a fairly restrictive definition of gender as I have come to understand it. My wife and I have twins a little less than 2 years old, we are both ~35, but we live in rural-ish NH not SV. She has taken the last 2+ years off for the pregnancy and to function…

"Women have different needs" is both extremely accurate and extremely predictive. Taking issue with the statement because it's not perfectly correct 100% of the time is, at best, exceedingly pedantic.

Re: Female Founder Secrets: Fertility

#346

Post by kungito »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #329
andrepd wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't want to sound like an extremist but this is what happens when everything in life is mercantilised. Money becomes king.

It's really housing and then money only as a prerequisite to that. To start a family you need somewhere to live. When housing costs are insane you need crazy money to afford it, so everything becomes about money.

It's ridiculous how often people repeat this because they want to live in expensive areas. You don't really have to do that.

Re: Female Founder Secrets: Fertility

#347

Post by nostrademons »

koverda wrote: post #148
rcpt wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In other nations where the state provides good childcare women have historically entered the workforce just fine. It's the US (and especially California) that drains everything possible from young families.

Could you elaborate on why California especially?

Not OP, but in the major Californian metropolises housing has a way of sucking out all available resources. There are lots of people and not enough land, which means that people have a tendency to bid up the price of available housing up to the very maximum that they can afford to pay. As a result, wages are high, but it all goes to landlords or previous homeowners.

Worse, this applies down the income ladder, such that childcare workers, cashiers, waiters, etc. are also living at the edge of subsistence because of housing. As a result, the price of these services gets bid up as well. This affects everybody but tends to affect families more than singles, because they can't bunk with roommates and they require a lot more services that involve paying other people.

This isn't really California-specific: families in Eureka, Merced, and Bakersfield do just fine (except for it being boring and not having many opportunities). But most people associate "California" with either the Bay Area or LA, and both of those metros have lots of money flowing in, lots of people flowing in, and restrictive zoning that keeps housing scarce.

Re: Female Founder Secrets: Fertility

#348

Post by vikiomega9 »

I'm not a policy person, so consider this a good faith question. If government policy mandates larger leave times (both parents), who eats the cost? I'm guessing the company does and the government probably provides a tax credit? How do policy people think about this?

Say we do have such a policy, what's stopping a hiring manager from not hiring more women who might be say 30 and more likely to have kids soon? There's two parts to this question, one if we have equal leave for both parents, and if we have 2x more leave for women over men. How do policy people think about these types of arguments?

How do policy people think about costs in general for such government policies?

Re: Female Founder Secrets: Fertility

#349

Post by centimeter »

ksdale wrote: post #239

I agree completely with the premise that most people don't appreciate just how fleeting fertility can be, but I think rather than freezing eggs, the solution is for people to normalize having children at a younger age and designing work and home life around children existing and even being present in certain work contexts. Obviously freezing your eggs is something that you can do as individual without society's input…

It's clear that, on so many levels, the gradual deferral of child-bearing to the 30s (even 40s!) has been incredibly costly and destructive to society.

We need to figure out a way to reconcile having children starting in the late teens and ending in the mid-20s (which is by far the safest, cheapest, and easiest time to do it) with the modern economy (which prioritizes slavishly focusing on school/work until your fertility has mostly dried up and you're at massively increased risk of passing on genetic abnormalities).

One strategy could be to have child-rearing skip a generation, with grandparents (in their 30s/40s) doing most of the work while the parents (in their teens/20s) go to school and start their career.

Re: Female Founder Secrets: Fertility

#350

Post by seneca »

centimeter wrote: post #341
random5634 wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, my mom always rebelled at the feminist push to have women do men's work as the goal (without valuing work women already did). Join the military, kill people etc. I'm 100% for that, but it's crazy that a women doesn't get paid for raising kids, perhaps the most important thing for society and with INCREDIBLE costs (if done badly) and benefits (if done well) to everyone. What's even more interesting, upvalue work…

> it's crazy that a women doesn't get paid for raising kids Because she already collects a massive amount of utility associated with raising her own children. The economics of paying people to raise their own children doesn't make sense; the externality allocations are completely wrong. I'm sure you can imagine some of the perverse incentives that come into play. A woman benefits from raising her own kids (with an as…

> This arrangement has existed for at least thousands of years and is called "marriage".

Well said.

The modern inclination to tear down tradition institution and then replace them with increasingly more damaging and convoluted schemes is an endless source of confusion to me. It's almost if we've become so arrogant that we assume if something has been done for generations that it must be wrong, which seems like the exact wrong assumption to make.

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