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Female Founder Secrets: Fertility

femfosec.com

571–580 of 770 posts

Re: Female Founder Secrets: Fertility

#571
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…

Here's an unpopular thought: raising kids, motivating them to learn, helping them mature, teaching them your values, helping them get out of bad influence, is a full-time job.

It requires education to explain the right things and show good examples. It requires soft skills to be patient and persuasive. It requires people skills to counter out bad influencers. It requires time, dedication and patience.

It's not the same job as doing taxes or writing code. But being a manager or a consultant in a software company is also different from classical hands-on jobs, and nobody has a problem with that.

But our society has taken a weird turn. Instead of recognizing the importance of this job, respecting stay-at-home parents and encouraging as many families as possible to invest in the future by taking the best care of their kids, we have effectively destroyed it. And thanks to supply/demand, it's now expected for both spouses to work if you want a regular lifestyle with regular jobs. So unless you are considerably richer than your neighbors, your chances are very weak.

Re: Female Founder Secrets: Fertility

#572

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you’re really that into high pressure job and grinding the ladder why would you be so attracted to raising a family as a sahm ? You can’t do everything at once. No one is stopping you from raising children but yourself. Many don’t go for the business route and that’s a respectable choice but of course you can’t have it all. If in the end your fertility is more important than your career then have kids without ma…

Steady states are the exception in nature, not the rule. It's quite normal to have a population that increases exponentially, hits resource limits, and then decreases rapidly. (This was like literally 1/3 of my calculus class - it's a pretty classic example for coupled partial differential equations.) Eventually the population declines enough that the resource limits no longer apply, and people start having babies ag…

So your... plan... is to wait for Western civilization to fall, and have the survivors return to traditional society amongst the abandoned buildings of the dead empire?

Your best case scenario is population collapse, but to do it without disease or conflict? Just everyone peacefully getting old and dying without having children?

Re: Female Founder Secrets: Fertility

#573
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.

Similar situation here, we had our child in our early 20s, mid-university. It was tough for sure, and delayed both our schooling and our careers (mine was impacted more), and finances were tight sometimes, but it increasingly looks like it was monumental luck. We get to focus on careers as our teen naturally wants less to do with us.

Only downside seems to be that I'm a solid 5-7 years older than my equivalently experienced colleagues.

Re: Female Founder Secrets: Fertility

#574
post #427

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.

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…

Hell, I’d be a trillionaire but drinking beer is my first priority, so I’m only a thousandaire. As soon as I get off the couch the $$ will roll in.

Re: Female Founder Secrets: Fertility

#575
post #542

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This viewpoint is common, but doesn't scale. Having kids isn't a "life choice." It's a basic requirement for a sustainable human society. I disagree, I think in the countries and social spheres where this is an _actual_ choice for women, it is very much a "life choice" (because the rest of the world makes more than enough children to resolve the issues of "sustainable human society"). When we'll get to a point wher…

> I disagree, I think in the countries and social spheres where this is an _actual_ choice for women, it is very much a "life choice" (because the rest of the world makes more than enough children to resolve the issues of "sustainable human society"). When we'll get to a point where world wide population growth drops below 2.1 factor, maybe then we can start reconsidering this policy. That's not really a rebuttal to…

There has been various research about Earth's carrying capacity. The numbers are controversial but it shouldn't be controversial that there is _some_ limit.

I think we are going to have to adapt to a post-growth world. Or maybe things will grow in other ways. I am not worried about declining birth rates. It's not like we are heading for a "Children of Men" scenario. The population will stabilize before it goes to zero. Or maybe we will just grow people in vats.

Re: Female Founder Secrets: Fertility

#576

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're technically not, but don't be surprised if people react as though you are.

Certainly, but I don't find the fault to be with the statement, but with people. Our inability to separate "inconvenient general fact" from "specific, personal insult to whole swathes of people" is one of the banes of modern discourse.

Unfortunately, you're communicating with other people. Unless you find a way to magically stop people getting triggered, it's best to avoid certain trigger words and be careful when expressing certain points.

Re: Female Founder Secrets: Fertility

#577

Earlier quoted context omitted.

James Damore went a bit further than the author did. He also didn't take care to avoid offense and misunderstanding when talking about certain topics. For example, he mentioned that women, on average, have more neuroticism. He's technically correct in terms of the psychological definition of the word (women will, on average, experience higher levels of anxiety than men when exposed to the same level of negative stimu…

> For example, he mentioned that women, on average, have more neuroticism. [..] he didn't consider the political ramifications of describing 3.5 billion people as neurotic. You're doing it too. If I say "men have, on average, more muderous tendencies than women", am I describing 3.5 billion people as murderers?

[dead]

Re: Female Founder Secrets: Fertility

#578
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.

That was the norm until suddenly people started prioritizing money over procreation. Seems to be cultural and connected to the "abnormal" prosperity of the past and even more abnormal prosperity expectations set by the media.

Re: Female Founder Secrets: Fertility

#579

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Are you as parents willing to give your kids a better childhood at the price of throwing away 10% of your career, with no (monetary) compensation? I suspect, very few. Literally every single person that has children does this. That covers almost 90% of the population.

Every single person who has children takes 2-4 years off from work? (as300's original comment, five posts parent to this one.) No, I'm pretty sure that 90% of the population does not do that.

Ahh, fair. I didn't realise that's what he was talking about specifically. I thought he was referring to the (real) monetary losses that come from people shifting priorities away from career and towards family.

Re: Female Founder Secrets: Fertility

#580
Really they should have fertility checks included in basic insurance for women over 30. I'm at an age where I see many women struggling to conceive because they waited to long. Knowing where you are at fertility wise at 30 gives people the chance to decide what they want to do in life
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