Comment by x0x0 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by x0x0 | Hacker News Reader

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Bluntly, I assume a woman will be far more involved in childcare than a man. This is backed up by the fact that it's often true, and is a reasonable prior. A male ceo -- and I've worked for several of these -- can / often does have a housewife, and is able to dump virtually all childcare off onto her. Crucially including getting up all night to breastfeed. Women often don't have that and/or don't want that. Not to mention pregnancy can cause severe medical complications (physical injury, post partum depression, etc). I've also seen several ambitious women in my personal life have a baby then decide to transition to a more relaxed career track to focus on the child / have more children.

If I were working for any ceo who decided to have a baby, but particularly a woman, I'd want to know about his or her commitment to the business that I'm investing my time, life, and money into. Being a ceo is generally not a 9-5 M-F job, so explaining how you're going to juggle that with the demands of childcare, breastfeeding should you chose to do so, business travel, business needs, etc is fair game when my personal financial results are entangled with the business outcome.

If you're planning on doing what Marissa did and installing a nanny next to your office, great. If you're planning on taking 4 months off for your personal project, I'm going to re-evaluate my dedication to the business if the ceo isn't more dedicated than me.

NB: I currently work for a female ceo; she and her partner have an au pair but he has damaged his career to provide more childcare than her.

> Bluntly, I assume a woman will be far more involved in childcare than a man.

That's a fair assumption across an entire population, but I doubt it applies very well to the population of women looking for funding. They're going to be a lot more likely than the average woman to prioritize business over childcare, and a lot more likely to have a stay-at-home spouse.

A child needs all the nurturing it can get. Choosing to start a company and raise funding while a human being needs you more than it ever will is selfish as well as morally and ethically wrong.

Do you feel the same about the men who do it?

Also, historically, lots of kids, particularly of the upper class, were largely raised by nannies and it appears to have worked.

I think women make better caretakers. A father can stay home and be the caretaker, but I think a mother will have a more positive nurturing influence on the child's life if she is there as much as she can be.

If you can afford a nanny, I wouldn't think you'd be raising funding.

"I think women make better caretakers. A father can stay home and be the caretaker, but I think a mother will have a more positive nurturing influence on the child's life if she is there as much as she can be."

You can think that, but it is most certainly not going to be accepted as fact by the many caretaker fathers out there. Nor, I believe, can you take it for granted that mothers in heterosexual two-parent households assume they are better caretakers than their partners.

Would you argue that a child raised by two fathers is at an inherent disadvantage to one raised by two mothers?

Yes. Nature and evolution itself tells us that its optimal to be raised by a mother and a father. To argue otherwise would be to argue against evolution.

All studies of outcomes ignored, naturally...

Right... So when a male polar bear kills the cubs so the mother can mate again that's nature confirming your theory? Or when apes keep harems and kill or drive off competition, if you prefer primates? Or how primates with testicles as large as humans are never monogamous?

This is horseshit. Evolution also says you're supposed to die in your 30s, wracked with parasites and diseases. But my guess is you "argue against evolution" every goddamn day when you brush your teeth. Two obvious problems:

One is your indulging in the naturalistic fallacy, aka the is-ought fallacy. What exists tells us nothing about what's right. If it did, then change would always be wrong. It's a big philosophical mistake, especially in one built around creating technological change.

The other is you're creating the sort of evolutionary "just-so story" that Gould called out as early as 1978. You have a personal fantasy that in our evolutionary environment each child was actively raised by a mother and a father. Is this based on careful examination of hominid fossils? No. It's based on very particular Western late 20th-century ideals of what a "family" is.

What you're doing isn't science. Its dressing your unconsidered prejudices up in a lab coat. And then using the authority of science to push a particular social agenda that involves keeping women at home. That's 100% horseshit.

And yet research tells us that two fathers raise children who are as well adapted in every way as ones raised by a father and a mother, and that two mothers raise children who're better adapted.

(I find it slightly hilarious that you think that children had only two raisers In The Ancestral Environment.)

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