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Female Founder Secrets: Fertility

femfosec.com

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Re: Female Founder Secrets: Fertility

#421

Post by earthboundkid »

mberning wrote: post #8

I just recently had my first at an age closer to 40 than 30. I think freezing your eggs and having kids later is not such a great idea. Sure, you can have the kid well outside your prime or even use a surrogate. But that is just the beginning. Your child is not going to get the experience of being raised by a more youthful and energetic version of yourself . I think there is a lot to be said for that. I wish I had st…

In the same boat. Another con of waiting is that many people I wish my children could meet (great grandparents, uncles, friends of family) have died. And of course I and my partner will be dead N years sooner than if I had children at age X - N, which means (at best) less time for grandchildren, or who knows.

Re: Female Founder Secrets: Fertility

#422

Post by gnicholas »

irae wrote: post #311
gnicholas wrote: post #262

Earlier 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…

> Their wives take care of the baby for the most part, and they work on their next book. I was under the impression people had kids to build a family together, not to compete with their partners for achievements. I don't think at all the situation you described is bad in any way. In fact, it would be a huge step forward. You know what is better then a new father stressed at work, absent from home, worried his career…

> I was under the impression people had kids to build a family together, not to compete with their partners for achievements. I don't think at all the situation you described is bad in any way. In fact, it would be a huge step forward.

I wasn't indicating that the spouses were in any way competing with each other. I was pointing out the inequity that results among professors who are fathers and their colleagues who are mothers. The seemingly generous and 'equal' policy of giving the same leave to mothers and fathers has the result of disadvantaging professors who are mothers, on balance.

(I should note that not all male professors spend their leave in this way, but enough of them do it is a problem.)

Re: Female Founder Secrets: Fertility

#423

Post by earthboundkid »

sct202 wrote: post #132
mberning wrote: post #8

I just recently had my first at an age closer to 40 than 30. I think freezing your eggs and having kids later is not such a great idea. Sure, you can have the kid well outside your prime or even use a surrogate. But that is just the beginning. Your child is not going to get the experience of being raised by a more youthful and energetic version of yourself . I think there is a lot to be said for that. I wish I had st…

I have older parents who had me at 40, and I wouldn't feel guilty over it if I were you. I didn't really realize how much older my parents were than a lot of other people's until I went to college.

Can't speak for the OP, but it's not a "guilt" thing for me. Just trying to understand the pros and cons from a personal and social level.

Re: Female Founder Secrets: Fertility

#424

Post by in_cahoots »

monoideism wrote: post #337
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 partly that, but it's partly what the GP comment says: the prevalent idea that true equality of the sexes is for women to become exact copies of men. Since women and men are not exact copies, this causes problems.

This is a common misconception. Equality means that both sexes have options. It means offering (but not forcing) men to take paternity leave, so that the family can bond as a unit. It means offering flexible work options for everyone. I’ve not met many women who want to work the stereotypical 60+ hour weeks with a stay-at-home partner that comes with being ‘successful’. We want to raise families and have careers on our terms. But the modern workplace and economy isn’t set up that way, in the US at least.

Re: Female Founder Secrets: Fertility

#425

Post by caeril »

Domenic_S wrote: post #294
gnicholas wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

Ehhh... the only conclusion I can see there is that more study is warranted. The sample was n=17, normal BMI children currently living in CA with parents who used Stanford for IVF. The control was several years older, and looking at the box plots there's substantial overlap in most measurements.

I mean, sure. We need more research. But shouldn't the null hypothesis be that children born of a novel and extraordinarily unnatural process be less healthy than those born of the usual process?

There's no reason to believe that after all the factors arrayed against IVF children (poor starting egg quality, genetic and cellular damage from ice crystals, mitochondrial damage potential, implantation problems, etc) that the null hypothesis would be "they will be exactly the same".

Re: Female Founder Secrets: Fertility

#426

Post by realreality »

The earth doesn't need more high-carbon-footprint kids. The richest 10% are responsible for more than half of global consumption emissions (https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/carbon-emissions-ric...). When they reproduce, they're likely to pass on their profligate culture to their kids. It'd be better for everyone if they abstained.

Re: Female Founder Secrets: Fertility

#427

Post by tomcam »

andrepd wrote: post #320
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 don't want to sound like an extremist but this is what happens when everything in life is mercantilised. Money becomes king.

Big capitalist here. I agree completely. The reason I'm a millionaire instead of a billionaire is that my first priority was always to have a stable family and marriage. I noticed all the billionaires seemed to go through a few wives before settling down. Didn't like what that did to the children, or what I imagined it might have done. This kept me out of SV (and in much more, at the time, stable and family oriented Microsoft country).

Re: Female Founder Secrets: Fertility

#428

Post by seneca »

frenchy wrote: post #395
seneca wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ex…

There's also a inclination (not specifically modern) to mythologize traditional institutions. For example, the notion of a medieval knight in full plate. The modern notion of traditional parenting is about 60 years old. Before that, things were much less straightforward, unless you were rich, because the absense of modern machinery and whatnot meant that that often both parents had to work.

> There's also a inclination (not specifically modern) to mythologize traditional institutions. For example, the notion of a medieval knight in full plate.

Indeed, the proverbial rose colored glasses. I think this is where a lot of conservatives get tripped up.

Being willing to make improvements is necessary to avoid stagnation, but it's equally important to remember change is not necessarily improvement (and often isn't).

Re: Female Founder Secrets: Fertility

#429

Post by sjwalter »

samr71 wrote: post #394
kungito wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I'm sure most of the people working in Tech in the Bay Area could go get a job at some firm in Cincinnati, with substantially lower COL. Of course, they would have a substantially lower salary as well, probably low enough to make the Bay Area the better option economically, even including the high COL. Of course, that doesn't mean we can't lower the COL of the Bay Area! Make Silicon Valley as dense as Tokyo, and I as…

See, you're looking purely in terms of financial economics.

But, just as there are other forms of wealth than financial wealth, there are other forms of economics, like social economics.

Your decision to take the XX% improved pay in the higher COL area surely will improve your balance sheet over a decade.

But what will your peers look like after that decade? Will they be a bunch of 40yo millionaire single people all secretly worried that they took a bad tradeoff?

Will the dating pool be full of careerist greedy types? Or family-focused types?

I've lived all over the US, and can't recommend enough making actual sacrifices for family. As in, yes, less 401k contribution this year, but I get a house proper for raising children and a stay-at-home wife that is extremely happily homeschooling our brood.

So funny, too: Building intergenerational capital for your family is now easier in low CoL areas, because the sacrifices imposed upon children raised in high COL areas are arguably much more damaging than them having smaller college funds.

(specifically: dual-income requirement means less parental time, plus high COL areas have spent the past decade making their schools less competitive in order to eradicate, for one example, the horrid specter of white supremacy from the math classroom, where it has loomed large for generations, apparently, which makes the "but the schools" argument basically irrelevant).

Can't recommend enough: Move to the country, homeschool your kids, spend as much time as possible with them.

Finally, basically the very most common deathbed confession is guilt regarding prioritizing work over family.

Do you actually care about regret-minimization? Or do you really truly care about buying baubles and ensuring your children are just as entranced with the rat race as you and all your peers are? If the latter, stay in SF!

Re: Female Founder Secrets: Fertility

#430

Post by ZephyrBlu »

david-gpu wrote: post #194
ZephyrBlu wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have learned that making relative comparisons is useless if you are not at the average. If you are more capable than the average person, sure you can settle for an around average outcome, but that is very unsatisfying. The way I perceive things is that I'm going to do something, I'll do it really well or not at all.

Holding ourselves to impossibly high standards leads to dissatisfaction. Accepting that we will sometimes be mediocre at what we do and knowing that we will do better over time is a healthier alternative.

"Impossibly high standards" are different for every person.

I fully expect to be mediocre at something when I start doing it, but I also expect to progress past being mediocre otherwise I see little point in doing that thing.

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