Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because your actual advice also implicitly includes a 'just give up on having a career' part.
no it doesn't.
Look up 'motherhood penalty'. The wage gap between mothers and non-mothers is massive.
Female Founder Secrets: Fertility
411–420 of 770 posts
Re: Female Founder Secrets: Fertility
#412Your 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…
YES! I have been saying this for years, but my fellow PMCs look at me like I have three heads or I'm saying we should all live in a shoe with more kids than we know what do.
Human beings have limited fertility. It sucks, but it's part of life.
Professional life is designed around the idea that you are a male with a female partner who will bear and raise your children while you are attaining your professional credentials and leaving them to their own devices. That is no longer a valid design because we now want female professionals and male involvement in child rearing. Therefore, the system must be changed.
But if you say that every PhD program, medical school, start up, etc. should be designed so that it's NBD to take a year off for having a kid, you're crazy, how would that even work, anyway, have you heard about egg freezing??
Re: Female Founder Secrets: Fertility
#413Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> many new fathers use this time as an extended sabbatical/research leave. How do they even focus with a crying baby in the next room? And how do their marriages survive such an abdication of responsiblity?
They go into their office at the university, so noise is no problem.
As for their marriages, it's not necessarily an inappropriate division of labor; one partners is earning money and the other is caring for a child. The potential unfairness is that it tends to result in men getting more work done, and appearing to be either more productive or more intelligent than women whom they work with.
Re: Female Founder Secrets: Fertility
#414>Freeze your eggs/embryos.
Trouble is that this doesn't work too well either, or so I have read.
Re: Female Founder Secrets: Fertility
#415Why 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).
Re: Female Founder Secrets: Fertility
#416Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 fert…
How do you think it's been incredibly costly and destructive to society?
Medical outcomes rapidly become much worse and more expensive for both mother and child as mothers age, as well as precipitously falling birth rates partially attributable to the increased difficulty of having marginal children as one gets older.
Re: Female Founder Secrets: Fertility
#417My two cent : we got the whole ''parental leave'' thing wrong because we make business pay and the individual pay the costs. Big firm might have plenty of ressources to deal with it and 'not appear sexist', but a startup or small business will not. It should be a government program to help both the individual and his employer.
Re: Female Founder Secrets: Fertility
#418Earlier quoted context omitted.
Child support is intended to cover the expenses of the child - food, clothing, education, medical, etc. It's not meant to pay for the time spent by the custodial parent in actually doing the parenting, nor any sort of "opportunity cost" of not being otherwise engaged in a paying job. Translated to HN-world: "I'm going work on a FOSS project full-time!" World: "Great; we'll pay for your server! You won't lose a dime!"…
You can always choose to work and send the child to daycare. Providing your own daycare instead of working is a lifestyle choice, why does the opportunity cost of that choice have to be shouldered by someone else?
You said "[custodial parents] do get paid ... child support" and I was simply pointing out that this isn't "pay" to said parent in the sense of "compensation for services rendered".
Re: Female Founder Secrets: Fertility
#419Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
That’s a pretty narrow interpretation of “marriage” and doesn’t track my experience at all.
Obviously it's an oversimplification, but the point is that marriage nicely handles (among other things) the allocation of child-rearing externalities.
Re: Female Founder Secrets: Fertility
#420I think women have largely been presented a false promise by progressives: value and purpose is derived from work, go do what men do to be their equal. It’s not necessarily anybody’s fault, we live in a society where money is valued. But I wish we could structure society in a way such that the value of raising children, homemaking, is clearly communicated and understood. Being a mother without a snazzy career is frow…
> In order to have a society of power career couples, someone has to raise their kids. [... Y]ou have to find someone [...] to be your nanny [...]. I don't see how that’s a sustainable narrative [...].
Bomb some more countries. Make some more refugees. Problem solved.
In England, when the aspiring middle classes started finding it impossible to afford servants (which was a problem, because that was a key mark of their status), they started taking in kids from workhouses to serve them, and made it out to be some kind of charity. When that ran out they started up guest worker programs. A notable one took poor Jewish women fleeing a certain German government. Win-win, right?