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Female Founder Secrets: Fertility

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Re: Female Founder Secrets: Fertility

#681

Post by AussieWog93 »

filleduchaos wrote: post #680
AussieWog93 wrote: post #562

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not a female, but I'm a dad who quit the industry a year ago so when my wife was pregnant with our first child. I think what you're missing is the fact raising a child is something that all human beings are biologically engineered to find overwhelmingly fulfilling, yet office environments are not designed with employee fulfillment (or even basic wellbeing) in mind. Once you become a parent, over time your viewpo…

> the fact raising a child is something that all human beings are biologically engineered to find overwhelmingly fulfilling This is very much not a fact, and I really wish society as a whole would stop pretending that absolutely everybody wants to be an actual parent. Then maybe the people who do find parenting fulfilling can do that while those of us that don't can make up for them instead of being pressured into a…

Fair call. "All" was not the right word to use - although it most people are wired this way.

I guess that word choice was mainly a reaction to the parent's langauge, where she seemed to be suggesting that career success is the be all and end all. It's an idea that was shoved down the throats of my generation (late milennials) by corporate/university propaganda and had to be unlearned painfully.

Re: Female Founder Secrets: Fertility

#682

Post by andi999 »

BobbyJo wrote: post #651
paledot wrote: post #623

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wage stagnation has nothing to do with immigration and everything to do with the obscenely rich being permitted to get obscenely richer. It's disappointing that your friends have fallen for that lie.

If we took every dollar from all the billionaires in the US we could give everyone around 10k. If we did the same for the entire top 1% we could give everyone around 100k. We could do this exactly once, and it would destroy enough wealth (most of this money is in assets, whose value would be destroyed in the process) that the real value you'd get out of that number would be A LOT less. The rich are not the source of…

Yes. Also the main point is: this means most of the gains (almost all) of a company go to the employees. The idea 9f let's redistribute income so the rich get less and everybody gets more would not make a real difference. (that is also the reason why the middle class has the highest total tax)

Re: Female Founder Secrets: Fertility

#683

Post by usaar333 »

lettergram wrote: post #612
john_moscow wrote: post #571

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…

I think most of the people HN haven’t spent much time with people out of the “bubble”. “Trigger warning” This is my experience from my wife, our friends, and my community & family. But it might provide some insight. 90% of women I speak to would love not to work and would like to raise kids (most men too). It’s more about the wage gap. Most of the people I speak with believe (and I agree) believe the lack of wage gro…

> It’s more about the wage gap.

Perhaps things differ outside of software circles, but at least here this isn't true. People used to have larger families on much lower incomes. It is that with do much opportunity now, the opportunity cost of having kids keeps increasing.

Re: Female Founder Secrets: Fertility

#684

Post by blackguardx »

rayiner wrote: post #646
blackguardx wrote: post #575

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 zer…

> 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. I'm not talking about endless growth. I'm talking about simply maintaining existing societies. The fertility rate in South Korea is now below 1. That's a society that's basically gone within three generatio…

>Right--so what does society and culture look like then?

Culture and societies change. No one can predict the future. If the population of South Korea goes down to 49 million (from 50 million today), why does that automatically mean that they will lose their culture?

>We can't even fix male pattern baldness for god's sake.

I'm sure we will fix that before the population gets to zero!

Re: Female Founder Secrets: Fertility

#685

Post by bradlys »

raydev wrote: post #570
nitemice wrote: post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it's not just about work/home balance. It's also about being in a financially sound position, in a strong enough relationship with the "right" person, to be able to have a child. And that's increasingly hard for young people today, with the cost of living being higher than ever, wage growth hitting a wall, and attitudes towards relationships changing. Having a baby isn't as simple as deciding to do it. The proble…

> It's also about being in a financially sound position, I'll completely agree with your point about finding the right person, which is absolutely true. But honestly a lot of stable couples are less precarious than they think. Especially people in the tech industry. You're making more than 100k/year on your own, you're set. But from a bunch of conversations, they imagine sending their kids to a $200k/year college or…

It varies on your standard of living and region. If both partners are in tech or equivalent then there usually isn’t a struggle but as soon as one isn’t, it can be tough in some regions to find sustainable living for the traditional American dream. Where I live (SV - peninsula) and for my age (30), I have no hopes of having children anytime soon in my current circumstance unless FAANG finally takes me in or I can get another startup to IPO. (As it seems wasting years of your life for one startup IPO wasn’t sufficient enough, sadly)

I couldn’t possibly imagine having kids earlier. Even now, it still seems like a pipe dream. And I have no interest in Ivy League schools or private elementary, etc.

Re: Female Founder Secrets: Fertility

#686

Post by aidenn0 »

lettergram wrote: post #612
john_moscow wrote: post #571

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…

I think most of the people HN haven’t spent much time with people out of the “bubble”. “Trigger warning” This is my experience from my wife, our friends, and my community & family. But it might provide some insight. 90% of women I speak to would love not to work and would like to raise kids (most men too). It’s more about the wage gap. Most of the people I speak with believe (and I agree) believe the lack of wage gro…

My job is a 40+ hour a week escape from my family. Overtime is a guilty pleasure. I know I'm not the only one who feels this way.

I force myself to spend time with my kids because of all the older people who say that they wish they had spent more time with their kids when they were younger. Many people I know who use work as an escape from family don't force themselves to spend time with their kids, and in 15 years I'll tell you who is happier...

Re: Female Founder Secrets: Fertility

#687

Post by refurb »

rayiner wrote: post #657
kaitai wrote: post #631

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't disagree with your larger point, rayiner, about "figur[ing] out a way to allow women to have careers and also children". But I agree with the GP poster (hycaria) that the top poster (astan?) creates a false dichotomy, that one must either have a high pressure grinding 100-hr-week job or be a SAHM, which are certainly mutually exclusive. Many of us do just work 40-50 hours per week. Further improvements in wor…

I agree 100%. We shouldn't create a dichotomy, we should figure out ways to enable people to do both.

But people can have a career and kids, just not a high-power start up founder career.

And how do you ever fix that? There will always be people willing to not have kids to further their career. Or work 16 hr days. Or never see their family. These are often the people at the top. Do you force them not to do it?

Reminds me of this scientist I worked with. He’d work all day, go home get dinner, come back and work until 9 or 10. He was an internationally known scientist. No way he could do that and have a healthy family relationship.

Now try having a family and competing with this guy?

Re: Female Founder Secrets: Fertility

#688

Post by adwn »

arvinsim wrote: post #610
sizzle wrote: post #604

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> The ironic thing is that the earliest programmers are women.

That's not correct, or at least, very misleading. The "programming" which you're refering to, would be more precisely called "data entry" using today's terminology. The actual software development was done mostly by men, even back then. In the 60s/70s, when computers increasingly had proper input methods (screen and keyboard), the data entry part was swallowed by the development part, but the term "programming" stuck.

What is today understood as "programming", has always been dominated by men. I don't know why that is, and I don't care to speculate, but the narrative that female software developers have been pushed out of the field is wrong.

Re: Female Founder Secrets: Fertility

#690

Post by nimrody »

arvinsim wrote: post #614
rayiner wrote: post #536

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…

I agree. Any culture that promotes less children, deliberate or otherwise, would eventually be replaced by a culture that does promote more children.

Except that cultures change over time. And, typically, when cultures evolve they tend to promote less children. For example, population growth in India is declining as the economic situation is improving (source: https://datacommons.org/place/country/IND?topic=Demographics)
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