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Female Founder Secrets: Fertility

femfosec.com

601–610 of 770 posts

Re: Female Founder Secrets: Fertility

#601

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Biology is brutal and doesn't care about fairness or morality. I still try to meditate on the evolutionary advances for sexual vs asexual reproduction to begin with. There's got to be a huge advantage of the separation of the sexes that is hard to fathom just because it's everywhere. Is it a springboard of genetic diversity that optimizes in ways we can't imagine otherwise? The 'compared to what' is always somethin…

Without sexual reproduction, you are limited to cloning + random mutation at each generation to generate diversity. This generates fast-growing, homogeneous populations which get wiped out as a group when circumstances change to no longer favor them. Sexual reproduction lets you grab non-harmful mutations from another genetic lineage en masse at each and every generation. This means that when circumstances change you…

aha, thank you. The compared to alternatives would be cloning, no change, or small and slow perturbations. Sexual reproduction === intentional mass mutations, that's such a clear way to conceive of it all. It's the genes that matter here at the end of the day. Wow

Re: Female Founder Secrets: Fertility

#602

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think these changes are likely because, in my opinion, there is a silent anti-natal movement in Western culture. We have serious issues of an aging population, not enough kids being born to fund social security, etc. and all of our solutions look like bringing people in from other countries with high fertility rates. None of the ideas being tossed around seem to have anything to do with facilitating our own f…

"pass on whiteness"? Never heard this phrase before.

Is it surprising? Coca Cola was recently in the news for having corporate training that instructed people to "be less white." People get really caught up in this stuff. She's a victim of an anthropology department at the local state university that is rabidly racist against white people.

Re: Female Founder Secrets: Fertility

#603
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 sa…

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.

I don’t accept the “we” here. Who did what exactly to “destroy” 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.

I don’t understand what you are saying here. At the bottom end, sure it makes sense, but not when you are talking to a bunch of people in the tech industry.

If you have a household income of $200k/year you can live a “regular” $200k/year household lifestyle in a $200k/year house in a $200k/year neighborhood. That’s true whether that $200k/year comes from one earner or two. In fact, if it comes from one earner you are a little better off tax-wise (because of the social security cap.)

It’s true that you can’t live a $400k/year lifestyle if your household is only making $200k/year, but so what?

Re: Female Founder Secrets: Fertility

#604
post #495

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why can't men write about it?

Parts of what she wrote are similar to parts of what James Damore wrote, and he was fired for it.

What I never understood was if there are less female software devs simply because they genuinely value others things more in life than staring at pixels on a computer screen (e.g. raising a family) and if this is the case in other time intensive fields such as medicine and law?

Biological clock and childrearing are well understood from an evolutionary perspective and are things that affect men disproportionately less.

When the topic of gender diversity in tech comes up, why is this such a controversial point to raise or am I missing the argument for gender diversity in STEM fields? More women are graduating college than men are they not? Why are fields like Human Resources and Nursing dominated by women? Are there simply different skill sets that differ between men and women that we are not acknowledging?

Anyone have any studies or data on this topic to explain why?

Re: Female Founder Secrets: Fertility

#605

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I help them with exposure therapy.

Re: Female Founder Secrets: Fertility

#606

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sa…

It's a form of demographic debt. By increasing the workforce #, you decrease the amount of kids people have (because they can't afford the time to have many kids) but increase total GDP until you pay the piper later with decrease reproduction rates and more seniors that the economically productive. I also want to say that it's not necessarily good to have one person be the house spouse only and then come out the othe…

>it's not necessarily good to have one person be the house spouse only and then come out the other end with no skills.

I don’t want to speak for them but I think part of the OP’s point is that this isn’t the takeaway we should have, but rather recognize and value the transferable skills one acquires in the role of a stay-at-home parent. It’s not unlike the trouble many military members had decades ago before there were as many resources to help employees and employers understand what skills transfer across domains

Re: Female Founder Secrets: Fertility

#607
post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe the proposal is that the government should pay stay at home parents to remain that way, because it is a net benefit to society.

Isn't it economically more efficient to have kids go to daycares (which benefit from economies of scale) and have both parents work and pay taxes? Of course some people prefer to raise their kids themselves, but that seems more like an expensive lifestyle choice than a necessity.

Yeah. Lets become drones and all live in a giant hive. Good plan.

Re: Female Founder Secrets: Fertility

#608
post #394

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…

Your own personal COL adjustment is what matters.

If you are happy living in a rented room and you like to order your food in bulk over the internet, the high-cost city will be a better deal. The 10x higher cost of housing isn't much for your rented room, the 2x cost of most things is avoided, and the 2x increase in salary can go toward ordering more stuff on the internet.

If you want some room to spread out, that 10x higher cost of housing will destroy your finances. The 2x higher salary doesn't come close to making up the difference.

I know a San Francisco native who left. On an ordinary developer salary, he bought 11 acres of land. He has sheep, because he likes sheep, I guess. He can even shoot an AR-15 in his yard. Just how much would it cost to get that in his native San Francisco? What salary would be needed? Do normal developers get that salary? (for calculation purposes, you can skip the lobbying effort)

Scaling down a bit, I'm also a Bay Area native who left. (at age 9 though) My house is 3109 square feet on 0.39 acres, just 0.9 miles from the ocean. How much would that run? My food costs are high already, due to a huge family, recently about $48,000 per year. That would double. What kind of salary would I need to get this? Is it normal for a developer?

Re: Female Founder Secrets: Fertility

#609

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am female too and I really don’t relate to this kind of discourse. 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 fer…

> 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…

> If you think liberal societies are a good thing, then we really need to figure out a way to allow women to have careers and also children.

Probably true, but eugenics motivations aside (and if you insist on going there we have egg donation technology), we probably don’t need to figure out a way to make motherhood and a small fraction of the most demanding jobs compatible.

There’s nothing fundamentally unworkable about a world where you can be a unicorn tech founder, big law partner, or Harvard professor or you can have children in your 20s but not both.

Re: Female Founder Secrets: Fertility

#610
post #604
post #495

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Parts of what she wrote are similar to parts of what James Damore wrote, and he was fired for it.

What I never understood was if there are less female software devs simply because they genuinely value others things more in life than staring at pixels on a computer screen (e.g. raising a family) and if this is the case in other time intensive fields such as medicine and law? Biological clock and childrearing are well understood from an evolutionary perspective and are things that affect men disproportionately less…

The ironic thing is that the earliest programmers are women. I think I saw or read that the reason why there is such a gender disparity in programming is because programming was marketed as a male-oriented activity in the 80's. Sadly, I can't find the source for that anymore.
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