Reflections on Being a Female Founder | Hacker News Reader

Reflections on Being a Female Founder

tracy.posthaven.com

699 pointsralphleon273 comments

Tracy was the best CEO I ever worked for. Hands down.

She listened to everyone and made PlanGrid a place where everyone was empowered to make change. Her passion to solve problems was obvious and raw. She attracted people who were similarly passionate.

I knew she had it harder than others when I saw one of our own VC's caller her a "little girl" while doing a fireside chat with her at PlanGrid. In spite of it all she built a truly amazing company and culture.

If you are reading this thanks Tracy.

man, that sounds like a trashy thing (for the VC to have done).

I worked for a woman cofounder. It's incredible the things some VCs told her, including trying to get the other founder to drop her from the deal explicitly because of her gender.

Make no mistake about it, the ugly goes way deeper than just a bad comment here or there. Thankfully the trend is toward better.

I'll second this; this was said in public to people that reported to her. What happened behind closed doors was likely much worse. Tracy's example of not using Mother's Rooms shows she was protective of that part of herself and not willing to even touch it when fundraising.

Is the trend towards better? I used to think so but the stories I heard in my time in Google was really, really depressing. The problem is that getting worse can be a self-reinforcing thing. Once a few women get badly treated and leaves the gender imbalance gets worse and the bad behavior gets normalized.

Real change is slow, one of the biggest differences is you used to simply not hear about similar things.

Back during the Bush jr administration my mother’s PHD advisor was getting threading/demeaning phone calls late at night from senior members of the administration over some research she had published. What struck me is the story was shared because the researcher thought it was funny rather than actually intimidating. For context some aspect of no child left behind was being pushed because it would line specific people’s pockets and rather than simply be discreet about they where pushing a narrative.

Presumably they approached things like this because they thought it would work without blowing up in their faces. Now days I think the risk vs reward on such things has changed slightly. In another 20 years things will be likely be mostly the same but probably with minor improvements.

There is always at least one guy in any group more then a handful of people. It is terrible what kind of bullshit women have to go through in this industry.

The first time I read this comment I failed to parse what you meant by 'one guy' and thought you were being sarcastic.

I also wonder what does it mean: "at least one guy"? -- it means one person who says ridiculing things towards women (in this context)?

(I'm not a native speaker)

It makes me wonder about the correlation between "the more of an asshole you are, the easier it is to rise in power" and "the more of an asshole you are, the more you treat everyone you can (especially those that aren't the same as you) poorly". I can't think of a single time I've seen someone treated poorly because of race or gender in my professional career (direct treatment; I recognize that systemic problems are both harder to see and potentially more dangerous). I'm also not high up on the power scale.

I feel that in a lot of cases, this is basically just bullying. Where people in power, or at least senior positions, will belittle others to their own benefit. It may not be racist or sexist in its cause, but can be in its nature. Basically, if there is a way to highlight someone for any differences, a bully is likely to use that, especially if it can aim to demean that other person. So it will be sexism, or racism, though not because the originator is racist or sexist, it's just because they are ignorant, not bothered and just like to bully or put down others with any tools at their disposal. Made worse by the way they might rise in power as result of being an asshole in this way. Until they fall

Seconded. Tracy was an amazing leader my entire time at PlanGrid.

It's terrible seeing my female coworkers blaming themselves for not getting promoted and internalizing it as "being too nice" or "being a pushover" when I know for a fact it's not true.

She’s also one of the best founders I’ve ever worked with. Her talks at yc are my favorite — incredibly honest, personal, and insightful.

Also seconding! I've worked for a diverse spread of founders (some good, some bad) but Tracy stands out as truly exceptional.

Seconded. Tracy is a great CEO and worked incredibly hard to make PlanGrid what it was.

Seconded. Tracy stands out among all the startups I’ve worked for as being ambitious, approachable, and someone who seriously respects the opinions of everyone. My time at PlanGrid was uniquely more fun and productive than many places I’ve come across in my career.

Cheers, Tracy!

> On some days, I would park my car on a sleepy street in Palo Alto and pump milk with a silicone hand pump in front of someone’s nice house, reading profiles of the investors in my next meeting from my iPhone. Occasionally someone would drive up, or a jogger would run by, and I would feel completely humiliated.

This is just a small bit of everything Tracy wrote. But I would love to see this stigma changed. There should be no shame in caring for your child.

Thank you for sharing your story.

I mean, it's kind of on her if she felt humiliated. I feel embarrassed by things that no one notices and no cares about. But those feelings are a reflection of me, not society.

Not really. They are reflections of what you have learned from the way other people react to you or to someone else.

Humiliation, which is different from regret, is a product of self reflection in confrontation to social feedback. That said it’s hard to blame anybody for a feeling of humiliation when it’s almost always the product of social reinforcement.

> But those feelings are a reflection of me, not society.

Society was the one that originally taught you to be embarrassed by those things, though.

Yes, with work you can try and take back some of that control. But those things that you are embarrassed by were taught to you to be embarrassing.

Taking a step back from her story, I find it so weird that we stigmatise some of the most universal human experiences.

Essentially every person will piss burp fart and poop. And almost every person has one of two genitals. (EDIT and our biological parents will have one of each). And almost every mother will feed their baby with their breasts.

And yet we have become so detached from the animal part of our identity and so caught up in some abstract values that we get squeamish seeing and talking about these things.

We have much to learn on this front from our scandi and dutch friends who have chilled the F out.

This is much more of a thing in the United States than elsewhere in the world.

Definitely. In most of Europe things are more normal: it's normal for women to be prime ministers or presidents, it's OK to breastfeed your child in public, and at least among my programmer peers, women are regarded with more respect than men (since there are so few of them in IT).

In Poland, the catholic church and the "conservatives" still work hard at enforcing the old barbaric gender stereotypes, but they get little traction among the educated population.

In Poland sexism in IT is still strong among some academic types. Not only sexism, but bags of other prejudices as well. I’d call it the „frustrated elitism syndrome”.

Really? I have no experience with academia, but in commercial settings I don't see any of it.

I don't really understand why the need to single out Poland. In recent history Poland had a transgender MP, openly gay MP and three female prime ministers. Breastfeeding in public isn't a taboo in Poland either.

Oh, that's just because I happen to live in Poland (most of the time) and I'm very annoyed by these attempts to "put women in their place" (usually, the kitchen, and with child-bearing duties).

What I meant is that things are good, but the church and conservatives are hard at work, trying to make them worse.

It is a generational issue. The older generation - which also is the one that is most easily influenced by the church due to pearly-gate anxiety syndrome - is quite scared of further modernization and obviously the church is scared shitless of losing its power base.

This sort of thing changes one funeral at the time. Fortunately younger people in Poland tend to be considerably smarter about such things than their parents ever were, though there are of course also still people in that generation that are dominated by the church.

Definitely. Most of Sub-Saharan Africa as well doesn't have an issue with breastfeeding at all.

The strange thing for me in the US is that the left doesn't seem bothered by it. They are usually all up to point out arbitrary social constructs but this isn't an issue for them? Am I missing something?

Breastfeeding has two major single-issue advocacy groups. The first is La Leche League, founded in Chicago in 1956. It has no particular political stance. The second is Breastfeeding USA, founded in 2010. It has a very slightly liberal stance.

My mother was an LLL Leader for 35 years, and is a founding member of Breastfeeding USA.

Yeah, the Netherlands is pretty good with the "animal side" of us as you put it (though it depends where you live too, in more religious areas clothing customs and attitudes towards sex etc. are quite different). Where I think NL still has some work to do is casual sexism/stereotyping. I'm sure it's better than many other places but there's still plenty of it around.

We can all do better, and even where things seem good we need to always be vigilant.

"I find it so weird that we stigmatise "

Remember that this was a perception of stigmatisation, not necessarily an actual stigmatised response.

Personally, I don't think people would bat an eye at a mother pumping milk in their car. Among all of my various acquaintances of every stripe, I can't imagine any of the caring, and I've never once in my life ever heard anyone say anything about it.

Once, a mother was 'open breastfeeding' in the middle of a busy restaurant, I didn't say anything or think much about it, but I thought it was odd she was flouting her bare breast smack in the middle of a busy restaurant, I thought a hint of discretion, like a blanket, or being at the corner table facing a wall would be appropriate. I mean, we are 'eating'. I feel as though this woman was perhaps trying to 'make a point'. Not that I really care.

But I just can't see how anyone would be upset or even noticing someone pumping breastmilk in their car or wherever as long as there's a shade of discretion. Even if someone might 'bat an eye' they still probably don't care.

I don't doubt the authors personal feelings one bit, but that someone feels there is a stigma does not necessarily mean there is.

> hint of discretion, like a blanket, or being at the corner table facing a wall

Maybe this is a stupid question, but why is any hint of discretion needed at all?

What is the problem with an uncovered breast and baby eating?

Is it for example that you feel excited from seeing a breast, and don't like that happening in a restaurant?

Or maybe it feels weird with people slightly undressed, in the same way as you might think it was weird if, say, a man (not woman) didn't wear a t-shirt at all?

Or is it that you think it's somehow a tiny bit dirty with babies and them eating, maybe drooling or sth like that?

Or sth else?

" but why is any hint of discretion needed at all?"

Do you really need to ask though?

When there's a topless woman in the middle of a restaurant, 99% of people are going to feel something is off.

There's a not-so-subtle difference between 'breastfeeding' and 'I'm going to leave my boobs hanging out while I set my baby down and get something out of my bag'

If you were in a restaurant, and someone was dangling their breasts for everyone to see (even a man for that matter) it would seem really odd.

I've seen women breastfeeding in public (airplanes, cafes) countless times, and I don't think anyone ever batted an eye, but there was always a shade of discretion.

A woman dangling her breasts around in restaurant, on the other hand, is a different thing entirely.

It's kind of ridiculous that we have a social protocol wherein nudity would not be appropriate in a given context, but then because of some specific need, that this protocol goes away. No. Nobody minds at all that someone is breastfeeding but people do mind fairly obvious nudity.

And I really don't think there's a soul in California who cares that a woman is breastfeeding or pumping milk in their car.

You've hit the nail on the head - breastfeeding is entangled with our relationship with nudity.

I don't personally condone eating nude in public in a restaurant, but there is a broad spectrum of ambivalence towards nudity. For instance, plenty of europe is fine with mixed sex nude saunas and beaches. And the whole thing is pretty asexual.

If you feel ashamed or self conscious or indecent topless on the beach, or even in a same sex changing room, it's probably not a stretch to think you may feel shame breastfeeding on the side of the road in a car.

Now you will have prudes and exhibitionists in any society but the window of normality is going to be a function of what the environment dictates. And iirc being topless on a beach in the US is illegal, whereas no one will blink in Spain or France at a topless woman (except the American/Brit on holiday)

But this is learned behaviour - most children don't care about being dressed or not

@jariel & @yomly -- thanks for writing / replying :-)

When thinking about it, personally, although I'm a man, I'd feel a bit socially anxious / worried about what others would think, if I was without a t-shirt in a restaurant.

> learned behaviour - most children don't care about being dressed or not

(Actually I cared "a lot" and was disappointed when I had to start wearing bath shorts)

Tracy, I haven't participated in HN for about two years. This article hit me so hard I had to log in to say thank you and express my sincere appreciation.

I remember seeing an interview with you when you first started PlanGrid and it was clear you were going places. Telling this part of the story is deeply important and takes incredible courage.

Same here. This was such an inspirational read. Thank you for sharing this.

We had gender roles because it was the most effective way to survive and raise a family. The cost was that women were assigned rather basic responsibilities. Because tech and services have evolved families can outsource some of the chors done by women in the past like cooking, cleaning. In the case of making babies the the technology is still in development but we will get there. Artificial wombs will be an option in the next decades. Still the baby requires for the normal emotional development close contact with the mother. In the end the fundamental role of the mother to bond with the baby cannot be outsourced and I do not think that's desirable. Will there always be differences between men and women in the workplace? I think the answer to the question is yes, at least for women who chose to raise a family.

Fundamentaly that is a life choice. But now with more freedom for women there is more pressure for them to achieve.

Creating a company is hard, very hard. Raising a kid at the same time I believe it requires super human effort. I profoundly respect the author, she is a real fighter. But few women when given the choice would choose to do what she did. Feeding a baby in the car while doing research seems far from desirable for most women I presume. Then the question is why she did it? I will be interested to know her view, but I presume she really cared about her company and it was beyond money.

This is the price to pay for creating a company, Musk works crazy hours to keep his two companies alive. Female founders with a kid are under the same pressure. There is nothing we can do here to make it easier: the world of businesses is a race, a competition, nobody cares about you're personal problems: a kid, cancer, etc.

> I want to see a world where men and women, who make up equal halves of humanity, also make up equal halves of leadership. When that happens, I wholeheartedly believe that the entire world will benefit.

The push towards equality of outcomes is a dangerous ones as it creates expectations that are not realistic to be met. Given our biological makeup and the roles that derive from that I believe this is the not realistic. While I totally agree that women who want to lead and are willing to make the sacrifices required are making the world a better place, it is not for everyone and we should accept and respect that.

I know I'm a little lateto the party, but I want to make the point that I don't actually think that there being few women in leading roles is the problem. I think it is a symptom.

I think it is a symptom of a real underlying hidden problem that is the discourse of todays society is biasing the interests of our children differently based on gender.

A lot of places we're strongly associating the color blue with boys and the color pink with girls. We force these colors upon them while they're such a young age that they might grow the same associations. I think this also happens with attributes other than favorite color, attributes such as behavioral patterns. I'm bot saying there's not also a biological aspect to this, but noone I've read has any idea of how much is nurture and how much is nature, but it seems to me that when looking at our (as a society) practices with our small ones, there is certainly room for a great deal being nurture.

In short I don't think that the problem is that there are few women in leading roles, I think the problem is that we are raising our boys to want to be leaders and our girls to not.

> the problem is that we are raising our boys to want to be leaders and our girls to not.

What you think initially caused that behavior in the first place, some time long ago?

I remember reading about this in "Sapiens". Suppose there were indeed women leaders many thousands of years back. Due to the hunter-gatherer lifestyle, they would not have had any opportunity to both bear a child for a couple of years at least (9 months of pregnancy, breast feeding afterwards) and be a leader at the same time. Add to that the high rate of infant mortality and you have vastly diminishing chances of a leader-woman passing her genes to baby girls. Now compound this over thousands of generations and you will have the society of early-20th century, before infant mortality rates started going down and societies started becoming wealthier that a leader-woman has to invest only a few months at most for a child by outsourcing most of the "gatherer" duties.

I've been thinking a bit along the same lines

Sounds like an interesting book, thanks for mentioning

> But few women when given the choice would choose to do what she did. Feeding a baby in the car while doing research seems far from desirable for most women I presume. Then the question is why she did it?

I'd say the question is why men do it.

In The Top Five Regrets of the Dying, all men say "I wish I hadn't worked so hard". (That's the second after "I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me", and others' expectations of male CEOs are a problem too.)

Why do men chose to live a life they regret later?

I think for men the incentives are different. If they succeed they have more options in dating, financial freedom, respect from other men, etc. Women get respect too but don't think more dating options (I would even presume the opposite). I met few women that are heavily into investments and becoming independent financially. Women value more relationships, happiness. Men are willing to sacrifice those for money and fame.

The fundamental issue at hand is sexual selection and the desire to leave something behind. It goes beyond societal norms and is buried deep into our biology.

> Men Wanted: For hazardous journey. Small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger, safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in case of success. Ernest Shackleton

This is the answer, I'm pretty certain.

But I think it'd be good with more female CEO's, for the whole world (this also based on biology).

For men it's not a choice.

It is.

However, I'll admit that societal pressures work both ways, they affect men too. Men are not as free to be a stay-at-home parent if they chose to as women are.

Not many people discuss this. I have wondered as you do, "is a large reason there are more male CEOs etc because men as a group make bad life decisions more frequently than women?".

Anyone who has worked for a few years quickly understands that a large factor driving who makes it to the top is: Has said person made the choice to do an insane amount of work for a long time, to the detriment of almost everything else in life.

After working for a few years most people simply decide they don't want that. An educated guess suggests: what is given up + the chances of making it to the very top = bad decision.

(concrete example: Tim Cook - wow his life looks just awful to me, and he "made it" big time.)

>Why do men chose to live a life they regret later?

I was discussing our experiences with my sister, we are only 1 year apart.

She felt very valuable since she turned a teenager and I felt pretty worthless as a guy I had to study hard and achieve the things to become valuable to people around me meanwhile she was already cool for existing (her own words when she compared herself to me) so she never felt any need to hone other skills.

Fast forward, she has less education and success under her belt and I do support her financially as she's my only sister ofc I am not spoon feeding her but I do give her soft corner no matter what she does I must forgive her.

Why did I choose this weird life where I've overworked myself to death - one reason : it's a nice escape from self doubts and insecurities.

Whenever I did choose to relax my mind wandered off to chasing girls where I got rejected 8/10 times and developed significant obsession and skill honing to bed girls, I later succeeded by increasing my chance to 50-50 on any girl I hit on. Sorry, if it sounds rediculous because this is my experience, you might think of me as con artist but it is what it is.

As I got richer I realized, wealth is not what it all hyped to be - my dating prospects definitely increased but not that much to make difference. But now different kind of people started appearing in life who just wanted things from me.

So I switched my focus from wealth building to becoming famous/important and I succeeded by getting plastic surgery + steroid for sculpted Greek god figure and also good diet and sleep this boost my success with women wayyy more than wealth.

Now I go to distant places as a vagabond hipster and get more women interested in me then when I walk out of a fancy car. So what gives?

Thing is it's not just women's attention that's hardwired in me but men also seem to respect guys with hot girlfriends and wealth and also many times people mistake being rich for being intelligent and I am often suprized that people assume this when you can become rich by being ruthless and morally corrupt.

drobert, yours is a fairly well balanced comment.

Summary of the article: we are puppets to our biology. This goes well belong gender, I'm sure that the guy who is paraplegic will have his own story on how he has to cope with things that many people take for granted.

Some of the most objective posts here have been either flagged or banned, i.e there is no option to up vote them.

Thank you for stating this as clearly as you did. I'll probably get downvoted for comment, but my reaction to reading this essay was to be angry with Tracy. She repeatedly put herself in situations where she had to choose between family and company (or at least thought she did), and for what? Regardless of gender, if you want to have a successful family and you want to have a successful high-growth startup, you're going to have a bad time.

This idea that rockstar CEOs can magically have everything needs to die - if you pick that path it comes with sacrifices that you need to recognize up front. Either you're going to be a bad parent/spouse (applies to most of the male CEOs I know) or you're going to be a leader who doesn't inspire confidence in employees (let alone co-founders, from personal experience). If you want a well-balanced life, consider other options like a lifestyle business or the corporate ladder.

Looking at the end result: company sold for $$$$$$$, and I'd think the child will have a happy childhood and grow up and be a happy adult,

... Then it seems to me she was precisely that rock star CEO plus with "everything", ie a baby in this case.

So it's been done already and so definitely is possible, I'd say.

> sacrifices that you need to recognize up front ... Either you're going to be a bad ...

No. Instead, I want society to change, so it becomes easy and un-stressful to be a female CEO with a small baby.

I was lucky enough to hear Tracy speak recently. Her persona oozed so much of what I wish I could be. Successful, confident.

There's always tougher, more human sides that we don't like to share because it allows us to be taken down. Like revealing the weak points of our fortress to the enemy. I can only guess what that feels like as a woman in the industry. I 100% loved this post.

Thanks Tracy for writing this! Count me as one of your fans and whatever you do next, motherhood, investing, founding, watching your children grow - I'm rooting for you.

I wish there were a clear bad guy here, but most of the hardship seems to have been caused by more diffuse social pressures. What could we have done as an industry to improve the author's experience? Maybe just having more female founders around in general (by removing any barriers) would make some of these circumstances more commonplace.

Many times in the article she perceive male founders as stoic machines that regardless of health or mental state would go to work and operate as if nothing is wrong, and then goes to copy that. That is a stereotype that is hurting both men and women, and removing that would resolve a lot of the hardship.

So if I want to push myself in pursuit of my dreams, I need to sandbag because working hard sets bad precedent for others?

Edit: why is this flagged? Is it not a valid point? If you claim that there is a problem in tech because men are stoic and work long hours even during times of personal hardship, you're effectively shaming these men for working too hard. This is something that needs to be discussed before you start setting policy.

Treat it as a marathon, not a sprint. Making time for your mental health is not a cultural priority, and that results in a high rate of burnout across the industry. I think I'd have made it a lot further in my career, and faster, if I'd avoided that in my 20s.

I think pursuing an idea or project with wreckless abandon can be a beautiful thing. The risk of getting injured in the attempt to push limits is the cost of doing business.

Can be; more often it's destructive, and to what end?

You mean reckless. Wrecklessness is the opposite optimization ;)

They can do that but then there are people like me, who need no weekend off, no vacations, can work more than 60 hours a week - I am ready to take all leadership

It has infact opposite effect on me, the more I work the more I am escaped from normal day to life problems and emotional setbacks (caused mostly by other people and being aware myself, I can't do anything but just to blame myself) I choose work as my escapism.

Postmortems often happen because someone ignored a pain point prior to the failure, rather than taking stock and doing some preventative work.

The general pattern of pretending everything is ok is one of my least favorite things about tech culture. I was going to say 'tech people' but it's clear that there are people who don't like this pattern either. They tend to self-identify (sometimes privately) when I buck the trend and do something sane instead.

This is probably also true of ACTUAL postmortems....

Well, the root cause is probably that raising VC depends on keeping up appearances.

Why is it that everyone wants to be manipulated.

"Shooting the messenger" may looks like it hurts the other guy more but I've seen it screw up entire reporting hierarchies. By the time things go off the rails nobody higher than a level 1 manager has any damn clue what really happened, although they think they do based on the misinformation they've been fed.

Keynesian beauty contest? A VC may personally appreciate a member of his portfolio showing weakness, but also assume that his peers won't.

I've had bosses who loved hearing bad news. And bosses who were great about bad news as long as they were the first to hear about it.

Nobody likes to get called out in a meeting about a problem they are responsible for but know nothing about. That's probably the weakness thing again.

> The general pattern of pretending everything is ok is one of my least favorite things about tech culture.

This goes way beyond tech. It is permeating the business world in general and society at large as well. "How are you? Fine!" -> I'm stable and we can do business.

VS: "How are you? Well, to be honest I'm having a lousy day, I've been ill for the last three weeks and three of my customers have left." -> This customer moves somewhere else as well. Besides the fact that most people really aren't all that interested in how you feel, they simply exchange these words as some kind of ritual formula.

People are pretending things are better than they are all the time because society sees anything less as weakness and weakness will result in things getting even worse for the person displaying that weakness. We are continuously conditioning each other to pretend that things are better than they really are.

To be honest, I hate that. It is indeed women who do this more, but not exclusively.

"Hi raxxorrax! How are you? Had a good morning? Want some cookies?" - Completely normal within my circle of friends as an honest question, but I don't like colleagues asking me constantly. You get nothing done if you always start small talk. The people asking you this are mostly not interested in an answer anyway. That is just the reality of it.

And then you do that with people that you might not even like. There is much value in some distance in a business setting. The most abusive work relations are probably prevalent if you get too close to every other employee.

One problem is that there isn't a social script for saying "I have been having a low-key mental health crisis for the past 18 months" in a way that people don't interpret as a request for help.

And also, it's none of the other person's business. Why should they care about you, in particular? They're just some random person looking for a solution to their problem. They're not your fucking therapist. That's what friends are for.

If you don't like ripping yourself to pieces, get out of the rat race after 3 years working as a programmer and live on cheap land away from cities (if you're in the US), growing your own vegetables. It's a much better life.

Is it really hurting them? Seems like both she and the people she sees succeeding as leaders act that way.

Being indomitable and regulating your emotions seems to be part of the formula for effective leadership; why would we expect otherwise?

Pretending that physical and mental health problems does not exist is a problem. It is sad aspect of human life that we reward social status and monetary rewards to those who are successful at hiding it, and punish those that either refuse or fail.

It seems worth to ask if there is a better way. It also seems that in a time where we care about inclusivity and diversity we need to let go of the perception that only people with perfect health should be allowed to lead.

I think it is even innate to look up to those kind of leaders. Obviously there are exceptions but they inspire confidence (at least in me, n=1)

For what it's worth as a counterexample, many people attribute Dr. Bonnie Henry's display of emotional honesty and vulnerability at a live press conference as a masterclass in communication, an excellent example of leadership, and as having played an important role in British Columbia's (so far) successful coronavirus response.

(Citations for the above are easy to find but I'm on mobile so I don't feel like digging up the links).

Maybe it's unfortunate, but nobody said being a leader is easy. It's why most (including myself) are not capable of such a role

Could be, but I assume leadership roles are hard not for keeping up appearances but for the actual work involved in being a leader. That we see hiding emotions as a defining/filtering attribute seems something arbitrary that society decided was an attribute leaders should have.

I don't think it's arbitrary at all.

You want to pick strong, resilient leaders/trade partners/partners/employees. If you had some magical way to order people based on actual strength/resilience/grit, most people would (rightly) pick those highest on that scale.

Unfortunately, the only thing we have to go on is apparent strength. So everyone learns to pretend, to whatever degree they think is necessary.

Those who actually are that strong/resilient (for example, psychopaths monofocused on profit and power who don't care about working 80+ hour weeks) don't have to pretend so much. People who are more human (a euphemism for 'weaker', because everyone's terrified of the idea of someone actually being better than them) have to pretend more.

But you see how the solution here can't just be to lower the bar of apparent strength- or even how it's not clear how you could possibly do that? Everyone still innately prefers to work with the more confident person, all else being equal! And for good reason! It's an okay heuristic!

Even if you socially decree that 'it's okay to be weaker sometimes :) #behuman', people will just nod along and then go and reveal their preferences by who they choose to associate with anyway. And are they wrong? Do we want to rig things up so we select for CEOs who publicly show their weakness? I encourage you to try!

And hope the stereotype is working for at least someone, or maybe we are completely irrational

That approach gets you to do most you can, weeding out those unwilling in a Darwinian matter.

Successful CEOs are outside 6 sigma freaks in a certain respect.

Honestly though, I feel like some of the higher-up men have serious psychopathic issues; if they do show empathy, it comes across as pretended, as a trained tactic to pursue their goals. I've worked with driven managers who didn't have this and in the high-pressure environment they operated in (mostly high pressure to sell and make money, it was in software dev consultancy) ended up overworked and lost 6-12 months of their professional life because of it, plus whatever long term issues they developed because of it.

Have people like Zucc, Bezos, or Trump ever taken an extended period of time off because of stress or giving too much of a shit? No, they just fuck off to their resorts, private islands and yachts, do some cocaine or whatever vice they have and shrug it off. And those are the public figures; behind them are the more shady characters that have a lot of money and power without the personality and fame. It's the investors that tell a good-willing CEO or founder that they need to sack people, to make the hard decisions, while they reap the rewards, earning ridiculous money without doing the work for it or having to deal with the emotional or moral consequences of their decisions / votes themselves.

TL;DR I think people who care cannot reach the 'heights' that the super-rich, super-successful do. I also believe a trait / condition of psychopathy is a lot more prevalent in men. I believe this is a big factor in the gender representation in the upper echelons.

> I feel like some of the higher-up men have serious psychopathic issues; if they do show empathy, it comes across as pretended, as a trained tactic to pursue their goals.

Some people need to deliberately practice social skills in order to successfully communicate what they really mean.

> Have people like Zucc, Bezos, or Trump ever taken an extended period of time off because of stress or giving too much of a shit? No, they just fuck off to their resorts, private islands and yachts, do some cocaine or whatever vice they have and shrug it off.

This seems like a statement that would require stronger evidence before I'd build any conclusions on top of it.

> I wish there were a clear bad guy here, but most of the hardship seems to have been caused by more diffuse social pressures.

Unchecked tech monopolies artificially driving up the cost of capital for startups seems like a large contributing factor. For sure VCs shouldn’t be engaging in sexist or predatory behavior, but that’s not really the root issue, just one of the more salient and proximate manifestations of larger industry-specific and broader societal issues.

The bad person here is the social norms and expectations formed due to the field being male-dominated.

Author mostly forced herself to live by those norms, despite facing different challenges. i.e. no male founders have to worry about pumping breastmilk between meetings, so asking to do that feels awkward.

If she chose to embrace her differences, and break more social norms (like taking longer maternity leave), her life will be easier. However, there is also the risk that the company could have failed by a thousand cuts that are difficult to attribute, she wouldn't have known at the time.

I'll be even worse and note that this is a story that is fundamentally about a woman achieving reproductive success - and it sounds pretty miserable. The male version of this story is something like how much easier it is to sleep with an attractive women because a CEO title is perceived as high status.

Most people shape their lives around having a family - the incentives here are not favourable for females seeking out these sort of positions. Men get a lot more out of being powerful than women - having power is nearly the end of the game for a man. For Tracy it sounds like it was the beginning of a process of disillusionment.

She's obviously robust enough that it didn't really matter to her, but somewhere along the bell curve of personalities that incentive gap will make a difference.

This so much! I had a girlfriend, now friend, which is terribly successful and attractive and she regrets it all saying maybe it would have been better to focus on a family early on. She still has a very good chance in doing so, but clearly thinks it would have been better to use her 20s doing that and didn't do it because of the pressure to be a career woman in her circles and educational experiences.

On the other hand she has enough experience and skin on the nose to be a great and stable mother now.

@dpoochieni

> [She] clearly thinks it would have been better to use her 20s

is it okay if I ask what was her age when she said that?

28, almost 29

Wow, I'd guessed more like 35. Interesting how life is different in this case based on gender

Thanks for replying

Yes! This is spot-on. This is a social construct and a good example why I think we should focus more on male gender roles in order to achieve better equality.

Males have strict roles, expectations and reward structures in society, just like we all do. Equality movements have expected men to step down without giving them an alternative way of achieving self-worth. They still have the same pressures applied, but are expected to ignore them.

I think we should abandon the traditional work roles which cater so obviously to traditional male power and status, and also find a way to liberate men, so that they aren't pushed to such extremes to achieve status.

Men aren't pushed to extremes to achieve status. High achievers push themselves to extremes, where extremes are directly defined as places where other people don't push as hard.

I know we shouldn't confuse is with ought, but men in particular are very competitive in their youth, and whatever you think you can do to replace the status game will itself become a status game. Cultural wars to redefine status games are especially susceptible to becoming the new status game, because there's so much at stake; completely redefining the meaning of success, and unbalancing all the previously successful people.

You're a man, right?

Traditional male power and status seems pretty baked-in. That's why it's traditional. You can try and repress it, but sovereignty is conserved: in the end, like 90% of young men all want sex, because those are the genetics, and they'll compete to be the ones to have it.

You can try and social-condition men to repress their drives, and you'll get a bunch of neurotic weirdos who lash out and/or commit vile acts in the darkness.

If the industry lacked vc's and businesses were forced by the market to be sustainable, a well run business wouldn't need to deal with sexist vc's. Instead a few guys show up, pour _oceans_ of cash on tall fit white dudes copying your idea, and now you're forced to compete with tall white dudes with oceans of cash they can waste undercutting you.

> I wish there were a clear bad guy here,

Clearly this is the bad guy:

"one of our own VC's caller her a "little girl" while doing a fireside chat with her at PlanGrid"

Bonus bad guys from the comments:

"...potential investors take female founders out for dinner, ostensibly to talk over the potential investment but in reality as an attempt to sleep with them. ..."

Just to be clear, I did not mean to imply in any way that bad actors do not exist, only that the article didn't focus on any.

I first truly understood how different it was for women when a friend came home from an investor pitch and casually complained to another woman we lived with that it had been another investor more interested in a date than an investment. It was then that I found out it was common to have potential investors take female founders out for dinner, ostensibly to talk over the potential investment but in reality as an attempt to sleep with them. These women felt that they couldn't really tell anyone about it because they didn't want to poison the well of potential investment, so they just went on fundraising and being harassed.

I don't know if things have changed much - it's been six years since I was out there, but from reading this I think it's likely continuing on just the same as it was then.

Ugh. That's deeply infuriating and sad, but it doesn't really surprise me much (if at all).

Recruiters on LinkedIn are the same. They try to hook you with a nonexistent job opportunity as a ruse to get you on what's actually a date.

This was an interesting read. I found it well written and kind of sad, if optimistic and hopeful.

Personally, I would love to see a lot more female developers. I am betting there is no significant difference in inherent potential talent between the two genders, so why are almost all coders I've worked with male?

One thing that bugs me: Women I know who wrote software kept finding new roles where they'd be in management instead and then they moan that they liked writing code and miss it. Maybe that tells us that sexism in software development is prevalent and they wanted out, which is no fault of theirs, and maybe they just wanted more money - but it definitely sucks overall.

I find blind technical interviewing easy because I don't usually remember new people after a few moments. My reports say "The applicant" not out of a deliberate effort to screen the potential hire's name, race, gender - anything like that but because if they left an hour ago I already couldn't tell you anything whatsoever about them besides that they've got this very idiosyncratic approach to loop structures or they seemed not to understand what thread safety means or whatever.

The only interviewee I remember at all now was a Russian woman for whom it was her first interview in the country, and her first interview in English, and my core goal for the entire time was to keep her calm enough that I could discern whether she knew how to do the job. It isn't humanly possible to stay terrified for say months, eventually she will relax if we hire her (and she did, she was fine within a week) - but she might manage to stay terrified for long enough that I can't tell if she actually understands what a compound primary key is and how these iterators I'm talking about work and if I'm not sure then hiring her would be a big risk.

> Women I know who wrote software kept finding new roles where they'd be in management instead and then they moan that they liked writing code and miss it. Maybe that tells us that sexism in software development is prevalent and they wanted out, which is no fault of theirs, and maybe they just wanted more money - but it definitely sucks overall.

I secretly (well not in this moment but ordinarily secret) consider women in software development smarter than men, on average, due precisely to this observed tendency to spot where the social and monetary rewards are (management, other social roles "above" developers) almost immediately and start aiming for that ASAP.

[EDIT] this is in general bigcos and "startupy" places, anyway—I dunno if that trend holds in e.g. FAANG or finance or the other places where devs actually do make really, really good money rather than just good-for-not-a-manager like everywhere else.

Possible for a bunch of reasons that women in the field tend to be more assertive and have better communications skills. Those are primary management skills.

Yeah, I dunno why it is, but that could well be. I suspect it has something to do with whatever's resulting in women attending and completing college at a higher rate than men, but that's just a hunch.

[EDIT] jesus it's so hard to write anything about this without walking on eggshells—to be clear I'm not complaining about any of this, including the college thing.

I agree on the eggshell thing. I rewrote what I said three times to try and block off any interpretation other than the one I meant. I have some friends that are female engineers and you a get drink in them and listen to all the bullshit they've had to deal with, you have to imagine how thick their skin is.

Yeah agreed, IME women, in average, have better communication and social skills than men, in average, and as you say those are what middle management is mostly made of.

Seems more likely that you have two groups here: one that needed to be very politically aware to get there, and one that didn't.

So yeah, the one that had to fight political fights to even end up in the industry are going to be better, on average, than the ones who got welcomed in.

If there was a concerted effort to keep men out of software you would notice that the men still in software were very aware of the political/power dynamics around them real quick. Because the rest would be somewhere else.

> due precisely to this observed tendency to spot where the social and monetary rewards are (management, other social roles "above" developers) almost immediately and start aiming for that ASAP.

Women are not identifying the most socially/financially rewarding positions in tech and aiming for them ASAP. Women in tech are getting told "gosh you are so good at communicating and being literate have you considered being a PM or a manager or any other non-technical role?"

>Women I know who wrote software kept finding new roles where they'd be in management instead and then they moan that they liked writing code and miss it.

I hear this a lot from men, too. We have a general problem in the industry of being bad at making senior engineering a rewarding career track.

Right. We glamorize "management" in every way, even going so far as to label devs "individual contributors". As if they only contribute 1x while managers contribute multiples.

I have this gut wrenching feeling that tech companies just can't be fixed. There's way too much that has to change and the powerful people don't have much incentive to do the work.

I mean, this is an issue in every company on the planet, not sure why you single out tech. If anything large tech companies have the best IC paths out there.

This is true. Many other industries are absolute cesspools of corruption, nepotism, outright harassment and just all in all hellholes to work in, but the media loves to shit almost exclusively on tech.

Indeed, from people I know, working in a kitchen or as an auto parts delivery person is far, far worse for women than tech (not that tech should stop striving).

>> but the media loves to shit almost exclusively on tech

I don't think so. Hollywood has certainly had a lot of issues in the press...

Perhaps it's that you read more tech-focused media? Or the founders/CEOs of big tech companies have massively high profiles and that can work against them when there is bad news to report about them or their companies.

Compare your best manager and your best engineer, and the manager _does_ contribute multiples more than the engineer does. You take this to the extreme, and the best CEOs in history have added additional billions in value to the companies that they've helmed.

This is more of a function of the person's role than their individual contributions though.

A CEO's decisions generally have far wider-ranging impact than an individual contributor's, but it's not a directly productive impact in the literal production sense. The CEO didn't personally add those billions of value, they enabled others to add that value.

Ultimately, a CEO's decisions don't come out of a vacuum. The available options are created by ICs and percolate through management. The point of the CEO is to act as a sort of tie-breaker to ensure that decisions are actually made by choosing some of the options.

At least that's the case in large established companies. Obviously the dynamics are different in a small startup where the CEO is also the founder, but if the startup is successful it'll eventually transition to the "large established company" case, even if the founder stays on as CEO.

Of course it's the role? Your generated value is always your individual contribution multiplied by the task that you chose to apply that effort to.

If you replaced an excellent CEO with a mediocre CEO or with a bad CEO, then you might see, from some baseline, doubling of the company's a value, or erasing it to nothing, based on which direction you decide to set the company and its culture. If you're the CTO for the company, your choice of team structure and how you choose to influence technical architecture could lead to productive happy teams or slow miserable ones. If you're the engineer in charge of writing a service, you could set your team up for tons of technical debt down the road, or a smooth running service that's easily and safely extensible. If you're doing a bugfix, you could spend the time to truly understand and solve the issue, or throw another if loop to the pile that the next person will find and have to understand before they can make their own patch to the code.

So, if you have the ability to spend a day on a single effort, one which will improve the life of one developer, or one that would improve the life of all developers, or one that would improve the life of all employees, there's obviously a preference from the company's perspective. And then you can consider things like, improving the life of people who don't even work at your company, but that's generally done on your own time, unless the company thinks that the reputation that they gain is worth giving you the time.

Anecdotal evidence tells otherwise :) Not kidding, in all the companies I worked for, the best engineers were way better contributors than average managers. Just consider that in many companies management is badly hit by diversity targets, they forcibly promote people to meet these targets and competency suffers.

Yes, I would definitely agree that good managers are much rarer than good engineers. Maybe it's because there's an order of magnitude less managers than engineers at a company, so you have less people to emulate and learn from? Maybe it's because engineers are able to use their off-time to improve their own skills, while for management you really only have books and no easy way for applied practice?

And then if we're talking about technical managers and not just CEOs, the literature there is even more limited, since most middle-management in the past has been of known repetitive tasks, rather than more variable more creative work. And it's not like there are schools that can spend four years teaching you how to be a good manager. MBA programs tend to care more about the details of running a business and let the people aspect figure itself out.

So maybe an analogy might be, if all the engineers you hired were self-taught, and if you only had one engineer assigned to each team. Then maybe your average quality of engineer would match your quality of manager.

One factor is that for engineers it is relatively simple to measure performance, while measuring manager performance is usually a very obscure and subjective process, allowing entry and promotions for weak managers.

For example, 30 minutes ago a senior director told her entire organization that the primary differentiation in the performance review for the managers will be "quality of communication". Not only this is subjective, but it is not a core performance indicator.

Yeah, interviewing is definitely harder. Again, we can draw the analogy to engineers. Is there a large pool of managers that have gone through interview training for managers and have dialed-in questions that give them good signal on how successful the managers will be? And then you run your candidate through multiple rounds of these interviewers? Are you running your candidates through different simulated encounters with different people and different setups? Or would you say it's closer to interviewing an engineer without asking them to code? So let's say you're trying to interview engineers without asking them to code, then you probably need to at least see all code they produced at their last job and ask their past coworkers about them. So then the analogous requirement for a manager would be to then interview a representative sample of their past reports?

Measuring how "good" your managers is always a hard topic. That's why I found Google's research on it so interesting, since they had both the means and the incentive to run a large-scale study using themselves as the dataset.

I'm not entirely convinced either that evaluating engineers works out that much better. What is the core performance indicator there? Lines of code? Tickets closed? Bugs created? Reputation amongst other engineers? All of those metrics are wrought with perverse incentives. I'd probably end up preferring evaluating managers on "quality of communication" compared to evaluating engineers on any of those.

No, managers don't contribute multiples; managers are responsible for the contributions of multiple people (teams) versus individual contributions of each person in the team.

Just based on what I've seen and the women I've talked to - a lot of women in tech are encouraged to move into management because (for a variety of societal reasons) they've just upskilled more in EQ than many of their male peers.

See also: the pressure to be glue [1]

1: https://noidea.dog/glue

There is also overwhelming pressure on minorities to not only succeed and be perfect but to gain positions of power to make it easier for those that follow. It's incredibly difficult to do that as an IC (for either gender).

My own personal experience as a female software developer is that there is pressure from all sides to go into management, and this pressure can come from both ill and good intent.

Others have mentioned that it might be because of perceived superior communication skills (good?), or perceived lack of "good-enough" technical skills (bad?)... both of these add to the problem, but I've also experienced that diversity-aware companies tend to explicitly want females in management/leadership positions because it sends a stronger message re: caring about diversity than e.g. having a female senior software engineer (As unfortunate as it is, I think most perceive "manager/team lead" as higher up the ladder than "senior software engineer").

A specific example: I worked at a startup where D/I was a huge topic and where we spoke about it during Town Hall all the time. Complaints (mostly from females from within the company, not necessarily from the Engineering department) were always about not having females as team leads, as managers, as directors, on out executive board, etc. So every quarter, each and every competent female engineer would be encouraged to try taking a team lead or management role if there was one open. Of course, a bunch of us (myself included) had 0 interest but the prodding was there.

EDIT: Also, just in case someone is going to take this as proof that "women have it easy" at "woke" companies because the bar is lowered for going into management or something... I feel the need to explicitly state that the bar wasn't lowered. When I say "competent" I actually mean the dictionary definition of "having requisite or adequate ability or qualities". I worked with some badass female engineers, who were certainly skilled enough technically and socially to lead a team.

I would have thought that this was an attempt to balance out males being more likely to ask for such promotions (and thus be granted them).

> there is pressure from all sides to go into management, and this pressure can come from both ill and good intent

As a guy, I keep fighting this pressure a lot too. I think it comes from organizations who don’t have enough technical challenges and they’re afraid top talent will leave out of boredom.

There’s always managerial challenges.

Said managerial challenges are often self-imposed though; I think a lot of people will know of companies with too many managers, who don't do a lot of work (that we're aware of) and spend a lot of effort looking important and busy (and rich).

Mind you, for my previous employer (consultancy) I felt like there was too little management and hierarchy; every department had a management team consisting of one or two managers and one or two sales, with other non-core-business tasks (admin) handled by the parent company. But said managers had to do everything; sales, account management, hiring, personnel management & reviews, conflict resolution, and oftentimes they came "from the trenches" so there was often an attempt to help out directly in projects as well. I think they should've spread out the roles a bit more.

Mind you, by default both sales + management there would ALWAYS earn more than the developers; what they could have done is hire junior managers that took some of the work without the exorbitant pay check.

> the bar is lowered for going into management

For someone who cares about their work and cares about the impact their work and exercise-of-power has on others... How do you even possibly "lower the bar" of difficulty for being in tech management?

Sure, you can throw someone into it unprepared... but that sounds about as bewildering and miserable as when I was hired as a Senior Engineer a year after graduating from uni.

As a male I've also noticed a pressure to move upwards from a 'regular' dev to e.g. tech lead or architect, but that said, I've been fortunate to have spent a lot of time working for a company where that was mainly people's own ambitions; they got rid of or raised the wage ceiling for 'regular' developers at some point.

I've noticed no talent differences. I've worked with men and women who were great devs, and I've worked with men and women who weren't.

I see a lot of different personalities and demographics including women coming out of coding academies.

But everyone in the bay area flirts with "getting into tech".

" I am betting there is no significant difference in inherent potential talent "

I don't think it's talent, more so motivation, interest, cultural dissonance, choice - and of course all the 'bad stuff' like environments that are directly or indirectly not very conducive.

Most fields have some kind of gender asymmetry. Have a look here [1].

If one were to take some time to experience a handful of those fields, I bet the answers to why 'software' has asymmetry would be similar.

I guess I'm saying the issue may have specific roots in tech, but probably more or less rooted in more broad, cultural issues.

[1] https://careersmart.org.uk/occupations/equality/which-jobs-d...

This has been discussed once or twice... What did your search engine tell you?

I was following the time honored HN tradition of posting one line about the article and then taking up a tangent.

That might be a practice to do away with.

But to be literal, I asked because I wanted to talk about it and not just read about. However that may have been a mistake on my part; this article, found through my search engine, was pretty good: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/aug/08/why-are...

Points raised in the article:

1. Inherent differences between genders, if they exist, are tiny, and vary considerably from region to region

2. Starting in the 80s computers were marketed towards males

3. Computers were often in the male sibling's bedroom and not their own, according to interviews with some female CMU students in the 90s

4. Self-bias "For instance, girls tend to score worse on a test if they are told their maths skills are being assessed than when they are told they are taking part in a study investigating how people solve problems."

5. Hostile work environments: articles about why women should not be in the workplace, sexual harassment and illegal discrimination

6. May not be a worse gender gap than other industries such as finance or media

7. Cultural: women can (physically) start a family by having children; men cannot; there is an cost to staying in a work environment with regard to starting a family, and there is a "risk-taking" in the tech industry (to be honest, I've always found it very a secure line of work, but that is what the article says)

8. Tech may be well placed to bring more females into the workplace

9. Startups where someone is encouraged to spend a lot of time at the workplace are not doable for primary caregivers (which is often mothers)

10. Algorithmic biases being implicitly developed by a mostly male workforce (e.g. voice recognition trained and tested solely by men)

Final line from the article, and why I posted my root post to begin with: “Computing is too important to be left to men.”

So there is a whole host of reasons.

> I was following the time honored HN tradition of posting one line about the article and then taking up a tangent.

Please don't.

You're right; it's bad practice. Sometimes I just want to talk tech and it's easier for me to talk about a tangent that I undersand than to stay on-topic when I don't have any knowledge, but that's a bad habit when it comes to a post on someone's article. I'll eliminate this behavior.

I think such related discussions can be interesting

There's nothing in the guidelines against bringing up related topics -- instead it's just the gp's personal opinion

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> I was following the time honored HN tradition of posting one line about the article and then taking up a tangent.

I don't have too much of a problem with that, it's asking a question you should research first.

It's not that I don't want to talk about it either, I just don't want to explain the basics every time. I'm also not an expert on the issue, many people have much more to say on the matter.

If I could add something to what you've pointed out, I'd divide the reasons into two categories:

1. Why women don't go into IT

2. Why women leave - and boy do they: "Women are more than twice as likely to quit the tech industry as men (41% vs 17%)" per https://medium.com/tech-diversity-files/the-real-reason-wome...

The second one worries me a lot more. We are talking about women who chose IT, who are trained, who made it. We are talking about a market where jobs and opportunities abound, where you can work from home, move anywhere you want. And yet so many women find this industry unbearable.

From personal experience, I can't contribute much to point 2, as the temptation of leaving is foreign to me, nor do I know women who left. Maybe it's a cultural thing - I live in Europe and while brogrammers exist here, I have no problem finding good and respectful teams. I have worked for startups without staying late and yet got promoted to team leader. I have encountered sexism, but I also have been treated better because of my gender.

I have struggled with getting into IT, and my biggest obstacle was my lack of self-confidence. This is by no means reserved to girls, but we do hear the "girls suck at math", we see boys dominating math contests or math-oriented high schools, and it leaves a mark. Here's another good article: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-science-success/... The takeaway is that since girls are praised for results and boys for effort, "bright girls believe that their abilities are innate and unchangeable, while bright boys believe that they can develop ability through effort and practice", a vicious circle.

Still personal, but not limited to me: neurodiversity. Girls are far more often undiagnozed for ADHD and autism. We cause less trouble, we get less understanding for not behaving accordingly to society's norms. Life without diagnosis was one without help and resources to deal with my symptoms. Instead, I was told my problems were my character flaws, which left little of my self-esteem. When you don't believe you can do it, you don't try yet another solution, you don't search yet another query, but you buy into the narratives mentioned above: your gender leaves you at a disadvantage and always will, you got As because you were gifted but this is how far your talents go, clearly, you're not made for this.

> girls are praised for results and boys for effort

This is a sad thing, if true. If true, it does sound very changeable. From the article you linked:

> bright girls believe that their abilities are innate and unchangeable, while bright boys believe that they can develop ability through effort and practice.

Everyone should learn somehow that effort and practice bring about change in behavior and improvement in skill level. It's the only thing that has brought me much level of success, other than birth.

No need of the "if true", it's studied.

Changing it in entire societies will take time, but there is talk about "growth mindset" vs "fixed mindset".

> No need of the "if true", it's studied.

Terrible. :(

> Changing it in entire societies will take time, but there is talk about "growth mindset" vs "fixed mindset".

I am glad that things are changing, and rather disappointed/frustrated/annoyed that at this point in time it's still a problem. How can we as a society not instil in everyone a deep-seated belief in, respect for, and love of practice? Am I nuts or is that not so much to expect?

Rant over...

It is a documented (aka scientifically proven) fact that women generally prefer to work with people and men prefer to work with things. There are exceptions, of course.

In my 20+ years working in IT I met a single woman that was a developer and chose to stay a developer; a few moved from development to project management or operations, but most never wrote a line of code after graduating college, jumping directly in PM, ops or any role that allowed moving away from coding. I do not have any good explanation for this, my first sentence doesn't fully explain this.

I'm convinced that the best thing we as society can do for gender equality right now is to abandon the corporate roles that cater unreasonably much to the stereotypical macho male gender role.

These are roles which in principle require you to abandon your private life and spend all your mental energy on the company.

Why do we even have these roles? Well, according to behavioural psychology males fight for status, and the ultimate sacrifice gives the ultimate status.

No wonder that no sane person wants a role like this.

What is holding these roles in place then? Well, I think the business sector and legislation is largely to blame.

Laws stipulate corporate structures, and business schools teach corporate structure perfectly in tune with the last industrial revolution.

If there is anything we can do to make the work environment more egalitarian, it's to change corporate structures and create roles which aren't unreasonable and/or customized to old-fashion gender roles.

Perhaps the current situation is completely okay? Some people sacrifice their leisure to work for something they care about. These tend to be men because of heightened competition. Who are you to dictate their life to satisfy your statistical egalitarianism? This is just bullying.

The sacrifice way more than just leisure. If this was about leisure, there would be no discussion.

The point stands. Who are you to dictate what is and is not ok for others to sacrifice in order to get what they want? Just because their values don't align with yours doesn't make them wrong.

I'm not saying people shouldn't freely chose to sacrifice something, quite the opposite.

I don't think some sacrifices should be required. It will always be a grey area: you can't have everything in life, there's only so many hours in a day.

Another thing that may not be okay, is that when you tool at the top 5 regret of the dying, most men regret having worked so hard. So why are we pretending this is what they want?

How, specifically, would you change that, then?

Because people on the other tribal side of the argument to you are immediately skeptical of the motivations behind your stated goals, expecting anything you would actually propose doing to end up hurting them, even though they actually see similar problems to you (just expressed differently- see 'wagie, wagie, get in cagie' on youtube for how 4chan sees the rat-race, for example).

So- someone makes you the emperor of the US. What do you do?

Slate Star Codex had an excellent essay about this, the nature of races-to-the-bottom, and the harm they cause to human flourishing.

Never have worked with a single engineer that worked for status. Not once. Especially softies know their place and have mostly other interests. They evidently exist, but they have to be a rare kind. Perhaps a specialty in certain industries.

There is of course the usual bickering about who has the longest... best solution, but that is another thing and certainly not restricted to men. Much more prevalent is the stuff from the other side that reminds me of this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N10-G8JaE5s

Far more common behavior. It isn't even close.

I don't think there are any rigid roles to be honest. Maybe just the ones you subject yourself to. There is the usual office psychology that is borderline pathological, but that is indeed a gender neutral phenomenon.

> work environment more egalitarian

what does that mean to you exactly?

> Never have worked with a single engineer that worked for status

Do you think they'd tell you they did, or show it in some way?

I think they'd hide such goals, because wanting higher status tend to not make a good impression

> I think I was scared of what others might think of me as a new mother and CEO, maybe because of my own insecurities, maybe because of the societal norms ingrained in me.

I see this so much from corporate career ladder focused women.

People literally feeling guilty for wanting some aspect of motherhood, or going through some aspect of motherhood.

(and then ironically apologizing about that, despite the core of their reconditioning being not to apologize unnecessarily all the time)

I am not sure how much this is talked about, as its always been a personal conversation when I hear it.

Personally, when I hear that a woman (or man) with kids is running a startup, I think "that kid isn't going to have the full attention of that parent..."

Especially when I read stuff like:

> I pressured myself into proving that I was as dedicated to PlanGrid as I always have been.

I interpret that phrase as "...at the expense of dedication to my kid". I personally think it's okay to "be less dedicated" to work in order to spend more time with kids (for both mothers and fathers).

Kids (esp. little kids) demand a lot of time, and they are only little once. Time is finite. Startups are time black holes. You have to sacrifice time somewhere...

> Personally, when I hear that a woman (or man) with kids is running a startup, I think "that kid isn't going to have the full attention of that parent.

So like, almost every startup ever.

I was under the impression that a lot of startups are run by single people with time to burn "toiling upward in the night"

I recently read "Masters of Doom" because someone here recommended it, and both id software and ion storm were mainly run by single people working hellish 80-120 hour weeks. Technically John Romero had kids, but... early on in his startup he divorced in order to free up more time for making games.

I guess it depends on how you define a startup.

Many of the "cool" startups that make the tech press are made by kids fresh out of college, but IMO these are only a tiny fraction of actual startups created in the world every year.

I would think most people here on HN subscribe to Paul Graham's definition, which is exponential growth.

You write "(or man)", but of course, it's not, really. My wife was asked in multiple interviews about her children and how she planned to care for them while working full-time. I've never even heard of a man being asked that.

At any rate, someone else's child care arrangements are absolutely none of your business, and this isn't a reasonable point to make on this thread.

I don't think they're supposed to ask about that - I believe that kind of question can be legally actionable.

You're probably correct that employers assume these things won't be an issue for men - though I did read a paper (sorry no cite) that found employers are unusually punitive toward the relatively small number men who scale back for child care. It's the flip side of the assumption they won't be taking time off - when they do, employers treat it as a misrepresentation of intent.

It is legally actionable but it is unfortunately very difficult to actually prosecute. Lawyers are not really incentivized to take on discrimination cases as they are generally difficult to prove and don't pay out well.

As an aside, during my very first job as a junior (female, 21) engineer, an executive told me, unprompted, that I would end my career by the age of 30 to focus on having children. Ironically enough, he was not entirely wrong; I've been quite lucky to have a successful career in corporate settings, but after a constant barrage of comments like these, being inappropriately approached (read: hit on) by both co-workers and managers, and twice now inappropriately touched by co-workers who received no punishment for their behavior (in fact, I was asked to keep said sexual harassment quiet "for the good of the team"), I am indeed leaving these corporate settings to pursue a path on my own. So his prediction came true, although not for the reason he predicted :)

Silicon Valley doesn’t really like people with family obligations. In interviews in my 30s, I found myself hiding the fact that I had children. Once a recruiter, trying to lure me away from a stable company for a startup, told me that I better take my risks while I still could, before I had children (I had 2).

I grew up in SF and I’m pushing 50. The population of children in SF has dropped to a little more that half of what it was when I was born. That’s an urban trend overall, but SF is an especially glaring example. What can I say? Kids are expensive and don’t pay rent, and parents have to compete for housing with people who Factor in income from renting out that “spare” bedroom on Airbnb.

Tech in the Bay Area would really rather you didn’t have kids.

I think SFs hostility to children is largely independent of tech.

It's about not building housing for 40 years, and running a terrible school system, etc.

Correct. Make decent homes and childcare affordable and you will see more kids. It’s not that hard. BTW, most tech workers in SF still work at bigger firms (Ie non startups) so the argument that startup culture is what holds people back from childbearing doesn’t seem to hold water.

Yea, a big tech co might be one of the most family-friendly jobs you can get, afaict.

Interesting observation. While I maintain tech isn’t friendly to families with children, I do agree it’s not a driving factor in SF losing this population. The cost of housing and schools have a lot to do with it.

I completely agree; I have somewhat of a conspiracy theory that CEOs/executives in tech are to some extent actively preventing us from starting families to increase our productivity. Perhaps it’s a stress to say it’s active, but I do think that the ruling executive class has the most to benefit from young people failing to have non-work related social lives. The diversity problem here in tech is directly related to this —- honestly, if we hired more women, more young men would be meeting women. My husband and I met at work, so while I complain in my previous post of inappropriate behavior from co-workers, I’d like to say that there are completely appropriate ways to approach and date a co-worker. And it’s really great to be married to someone for whom an understanding of our work lives is a given.

I'm sorry this happened and thank you for sharing. We really do need to encourage a speak up culture. The most disgusting part of what you posted to me was keeping quiet for the good of the team. I'm sorry, but I don't care about any stupid App or project enough to make that an acceptable option.

I was regularly in my last round of interviews, and I'm a man. Shrug.

Really. Say more.

Job required a lot of travel, I have at least one kid, partner works full-time. Got a bunch of questions about my childcare situation, hinting if I was committed to this job (requires long hours), etc. It's pretty standard in this line of work (dominated by men) to worry about men with families, preferring bachelors instead.

Not saying it's acceptable or anything. But it is really common.

ehhhh I don't think thats a distinction that you can reserve for people running startups

and being effective at an executive role at a startup or big company doesn't mean a child has to be neglected

sure thats what happens a lot, but its not intrinsically tied together

I do find it interesting that the patches to this in some developed countries - regarding paid and extended paternal leave (1 to 3 years, job guaranteed) - are incompatible with corporate growth, and those countries are specifically not known for being able to "move fast and break things". So although I would offer those patches for the American market, the rebuttals are too predictable.

Kids don't actually demand that much time. It just turns out a lot of (Western) people spend tons of time with their kids, so we think they demand a lot of time. For example, I used to live in Africa and in the town where I lived, kids 2 and older were expected to look out after themselves. Regularly, a 4-year old would be asked to go get some bread from the store, or even cigarettes and beer. I think this is natural, and helps the kids develop and learn resilience.

Kids will be fine on their own, and I don't think it's a problem for both parents to work for full-time, on a start-up or otherwise. Society should have no problem with a 6 year old playing alone in a park, or walking to school, or whatever. See:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_enough_parent

I wish I had more up votes to give.

Do you have kids? Are you speaking from experience? A kid of 2 is not able to look after him/herself. Kids that young need lots of attention. I am speaking from experience, by the way.

I have kids. Including a one and a half year old. He wants a lot of attention, and he gets it, especially in these covid times. But wanting attention and needing it are different things.

It's both. When I hear that "kids don't demand that much attention" it feels terribly insulting, plus it opens the door for terrible job practices, demanding from parents and telling them "don't use your kids as an excuse, they don't actually demand too much".

The notion that a 2 year old can take care of him/herself is ridiculous. No-one who has a 2 year old will actually say that. That's why I asked the parent poster (and they didn't reply...)

This, for example, is deeply problematic:

> Kids will be fine on their own, and I don't think it's a problem for both parents to work for full-time, on a start-up or otherwise.

This flies in the face of evidence, plus it opens the door for terrible demands to be asked of employees who are parents.

> This flies in the face of evidence

What evidence, beyond your assertions? Fwiw I do not believe the person you are quoting meant that you can literally leave your child at home alone all day. Rather they are suggesting you don't need to be their playmate and constant companion.

Sub-Saharan Africa continues to be the region with the highest under-five mortality rate in the world—78 deaths per 1,000 live births. In 2018, 1 in 13 children in sub-Saharan Africa died before reaching her or his fifth birthday—15 times higher than the risk for children born in high-income countries. [1]

The West is pretty much avoiding that specific scenario.

[1] - https://data.unicef.org/topic/child-survival/under-five-mort....

One third of those died as newborns, and another third died before their first birthday. Once they hit their first birthday, the risk of a child dying before five is indeed about twice as high as in the highest income countries, and it's not "lack of supervision" that kills them - it's measles, malaria, diarrhoea and starvation. This is not evidence that western parenting is what keeps their kids alive.

I'll second your opinion about raising children outside the West, but from Russia - due to relatively great childcare options (a hold over from the Soviet days, when women were tasked en masse to rebuild the country after the massive casualties of soldiers in WWII [1], and the infrastructure to support that had to be rolled out reliably and systematically), it seems to me that my own peers in Russia are less conflicted about children, and less fixated on this psychoanalytic conviction that every single thing one does will potentially create trauma for a lifetime. When visiting my family, I noticed most adults were married and with children by the early twenties - but they didn't put their life on hold! They continued their degrees (men and women both) and careers, children in hand. Someone told me the equivalent of "it's just children, what's the big deal?" when I asked about it. Note this was after the reversal of the decrease in fertility trend of the early 2000s. [2]

I came away with the impression that my Russian colleagues are mostly correct. We have been working and fighting for survival for eons - the entirety of human history! And it is only in the last couple of hundred years that we developed this idea that a child is precious and fragile, and a parent must be nothing short of perfect lest they raise a monster.

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties_of_the... 2 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Russia

How can you judge her capability as a mother based only on extrapolating from what she actually said?

Not even with people running a startup; in my country there's a LOT of parents who have kids, take up their parental leave (and then some if possible) but then go back to work, leaving their kids with the grandparents or day care. Part of that is because living here (esp. the big cities) is too expensive, but the other part is that people like their careers, they don't want to have to give that up to raise a family. Not all families, etc, but there's quite a few that do. And the government is actually supporting it, subsidizing daycare for lower incomes.

I'm not judging it; I wouldn't want to switch careers to become a full-time parent, I don't like kids.

OTOH, if my girlfriend were to get a well paying job and I had the opportunity to work less to pursue other things, I'd probably take it.

> I personally think it's okay to "be less dedicated" to work in order to spend more time with kids (for both mothers and fathers).

Thanks for your permission?

Those people have clocks and can count to 60, you know?

They have thought about it. They have agonized about it. They feared and/or regretted missing their child's first steps.

They owe you no explanation.

> To top it all off, I felt I had to be a version of what I thought a good male CEO was, so that I wouldn’t be judged or treated differently. It would take me years before I realized how delusional I was. I became a better and happier leader by being honest in who I was.

So one of the main problems as female founder was to imitate men’s idealized CEO role?

Men also suffer trying to imitate idealized roles, but we do not have women’s specific problems which OP comments. I guess it would make a lot of sense that Tracy shows women how is the female CEO role that adapts better to her identity rather than wish for some sort of equality which will never happen just for claiming it.

Just a suggestion, but overall I enjoyed reading it as it is a good insight on some of the struggles female founders face which aren’t always obvious for men.

> good insight on some of the struggles female founders face which aren’t always obvious for men.

Yes, and especially since people tend to try to hide their struggles so no one knows about it

"Not a lot is written about being a female founder and CEO"

Maybe this is just a Scandinavian perspective, but I feel like there is in fact quite a lot written about this.

This was an interesting read. Building and selling a company for $875m, that’s amazing!

I was a bit confused, did the tech exec just quit without notice when they learned the CEO was pregnant? How would they be able to justify that insanity to their next employer?

I think you are reading too much into that part. She was telling the height of ups and downs as a CEO in that single day.

I worked at PlanGrid during this event.

The exec in question received an offer from one of the Big 4 at an equivalent (and possibly more senior - this was in late 2017, so memory is fuzzy) exec-level position, and simply sent word they wouldn't come into the office the next day. There was no two-week notice or polite exit interview - they just vanished.

It was not common news that Tracy was pregnant at the time, so I do not believe it factored into his decision at all.

The exec in question is very well-known and had lead successful teams at much bigger companies before. We speculated, at the time, that he had found working for a startup to be a very different beast instead.

Ah I see, thank you for explaining that. I misinterpreted that sentence.

There was and still is a lot of speculation about why exactly he left.

I'm curious, which companies make up the Big 4? Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft?

Usually some subset of Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and Google

So Big 5, really, but I feel Apple is usually omitted because its primary focus is consumer hardware and the software is usually an ancillary product.

Usually "Big Four" refers to the 4 largest accounting firms: Deloitte, EY, KPMG, PWC.[1] If it's referring to tech, that's an odd/confusing usage when "FANG" is so prevalent for the same concept but explicitly for tech.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Four_accounting_firms

In my experience, the vast majority of people in tech are completely unaware of the accounting usage. I only know it because my two siblings work for two of them.

I'm not going to comment on the actual article, which IMO is a frank stream-of-consciousness blog rather than an analysis.

But here are 2 things to keep in mind:

1) Founders, and some engineers, join a startup for the vision or adventure.

But most other staff, especially salespersons and executives, are there for reliable cash. Not "on-the-come" or "we'll see where this goes."

I've interviewed salesmen for a startup, and the first question they ask is, "What's the base salary?" And it better be risk-free and close to $100k in SF, regardless of the commission. Or they'll just think, "Time to call my buddy at FAANG or Oracle" and walk out.

2) If you haven't had a child, then you don't know what the dramatic physical, mental and social impacts are. The author described mostly the physical side of having a child, but not the other 2 factors. Post-partum depression can have long-lasting effects far beyond the act of giving birth - my partner behaved literally like a stranger for 18 months. What you see on TV is definitely not reality.

"Women have different lived experiences than men, and not acknowledging this would be a disservice to humanity."

Then later...

"The tech industry has a long way to go toward gender equality in the workplace. ... I want to see a world where men and women, who make up equal halves of humanity, also make up equal halves of leadership."

So she is doing a disservice to humanity by her logic.

She chose to have a child. She is not holding herself accountable for that decision. Men don't worry about this decision, and therefore have more of an obligation to take care of women.

Go on, continue thinking you can compete with men, who don't have this biological requirement. You will continue to lose, unless you forfeit the privilege of bearing a child, in which case you just became like a man.

Reflections on being a trans founder: Nobody cares. Prepare to be misgendered a fair amount. Know that you will have to go to bat for your employees which may limit your options when it comes to going to bat for yourself. Thank you for coming to my ted talk.

Sounds brutal. Are you still running your company? Sincerely, good luck.

I didn't understand what you meant by going to bat for your employees - bat against whom?

Karens, mostly.

What do you mean by "nobody cares"? As in they don't care which gender you identify as and treat you normally (or not)?

> I think it is easier for predators to target their prey when they are alone. I was never alone.

I hate that this is true. But it's probably valuable advice for any gender.

It's rough. And confusing. And surprising. For a guy anyway...

I have no illusions that it isn't 99.9% worse for a female, but when I was the founder/exec at a startup in the 90s, and driving staff home after happy hours, I was shocked at how physically aggressive some of them were about "going for it" with me in the driver's seat of a car. Some even got glitter all over my family sedan (ewww!). Which I then had to explain to my wife (that didn't go very well a couple of times).

Sometimes people didn't have an appropriate upbringing and have twisted morals or decision-making apparatii. I have the utmost sympathy for women, because they are "at risk" and I am not, but it's a weird weird world out there.

This was a good read and I thank Tracy for writing it. However, I do have some remarks about the comments I am reading here, so I am writing a top level post so as to not single out a specific comment.

It doesn't become ok to stereotype just because the stereotypes are saying nice things about the right demographics. I read a comment here talking about women going into management roles because of higher 'EQ', and being better than men at noticing social and monetary rewards, and what not.

I think that if someone had made a comment about men having more 'technical aptitude' or something they'd be down-voted, and rightly.

> I read a comment here talking about women going into management roles because of higher 'EQ', and being better than men at noticing social and monetary rewards, and what not.

There was more than one comment, so you might be right about some of them. But the ones I read had an extra level of indirection: it wasn't the authors of the comments who had the "women have higher EQ" idea but the people they were talking about and who are pressuring women to move into management. So it is not "X is true" but "Y thinks X is true and so is doing Z" that is being presented as a fact.

Yes the tone deafness in these comments is astonishing. I can absolutely see why women/minorities are unwilling to put up with that to work in technology. My hope is that more people begin to see that this isn’t ok and that the culture changes, and I am glad that you pointed this out specifically.

You'll also notice how the comments are not "wow, it sounds hard to rise to the top 1% of society and amass more wealth than most people will see in their lifetimes" but rather "wow, it sounds hard to be a woman".

I've honestly never seen worse sexism than in this thread. Truly shameful.

I started a company 8 years ago. I went through startup literature. I tried to follow the advices. We got our product going for 2 years. But we couldn't make it big. We eventually transitioned to contracting work. We were basically working for a bigger company. Except we had the freedom to work from home. We're about to fold during this pandemic. I'm happy with the choices I made.

My take away lesson is most of the startup advices are molding us into stereotypes. You have to come up with a business model and projection. You have to have more than 1 founder. Silicon Valley is where you want to be. We have to do xyz to raise funding. These advices distract us from building products and selling to customers. They also create unhealthy relationships.

I think corporate structures and funding industries have baked-in inequalities. They are optimized for pattern matching. They discriminate against a lot of things: company size, gender, race, etc. When you follow company building advices, you are trying to retrofit into these structures. Stereotypes and discriminations come with them. You'll be disappointed and unhappy.

For my next projects, I don't seek out for advices. I build stuff, find users, find customers. The only advice filter is: help me find customers.

I think it was Maciej Cegłowski, founder of https://pinboard.in, who related the following story:

- He had a competitor who couldn't make the product work given revenues < costs

- He ended up buying the competitor

- Because his infrastructure costs were much lower (I believe due to NOT using AWS whereas the competitor did) he was able to make money on the cash flow from the competitor because he ran his business more efficiently.

This story struck me because it was a vivid reminder that two companies, in the same industry and with the same product can have VASTLY different operating models when it comes to people, costs, infrastructure etc.

I 100% believe you are correct in that pattern matching plays a role. That being said, it's important to add that there are "a thousand right ways and a million wrong ways." Just because one of the 1000 is the hot ticket doesn't mean it's the only way.

The pattern that matches best is "making a fat profit".

A real estate agent told me once that a client has decided whether he wants to buy the house or not before he opens the front door.

Have you ever bought a house? More than one?

That real estate agent is feeding you a line of baloney. If you aren't interested in a house you don't go looking at it. If you want to buy a house before you even step foot in it, you're a fool.

Would you buy a house that way?

I agree with the OP commenter here. Silicon Valley advice is a load of malarkey. Focus on the customers. Focus on your market. Stop listening to stupid advice.

Yeah, I have. And he's right. Once you open the door, you're looking for a reason to not buy it. For example, you don't hire a home inspector if you don't want to buy the property.

That's not how the quote is said above. The real estate agent says the client has decided on the house before they step foot in it. I have bought and sold many a house and I've never made a decision that way.

Looking for insight / looking for reasons, ok, I agree with you. But clients who make decisions without stepping foot in a house? That's crazy talk.

> That's not how the quote is said above.

That's not how English works. I did not say "the client has always decided". Nobody expects statements are absolute when talking about the behaviors of people. The non-literal meanings of English is why each profession has its own specialized jargon (like lawyer legalese, military jargon, and aviation terms).

Seems like most people cargo cult companies together or even keep big companies running by cargo culting. Getting praised if they are successful but it''s maybe not on purpose they got successful.

How else would they do it? Starting companies is not exactly a science, is it? AFAIK MBAs teach you to run businesses efficiently and maybe understand how markets work but they won’t tell you how to build a firm.

You have to start somewhere. Seems like the cargo curling involves a bunch of relevant advice mixed in with a fair amount of virtue signaling.

This is the best comment here. Absolutely right. Take advice with a grain of salt. Focus on your customers.

I find this article incredibly sad for a number of reasons. The story is of a woman who has reached a level of success that very few ever reach, and not for lack of trying. In addition, she managed to have a child at the same time! This is something very few people in history have achieved.

But the reflections we see are entirely negative. There are no reports of the elation after acquiring VC funding, the high that comes with finally shipping after months of graft, or enjoying the fruits of recognition after becoming one of the wealthiest people on the planet. Nor are there any reports of the joy of having a child or the love and support that exists within her relationship. On the surface this is a person who has achieved everything that we're told should bring happiness, but what we see is someone drained, tired and ultimately unhappy.

The life of a founder and CEO of a company is far from a normal human experience. It's a lifestyle that very few in society are well-suited for. While a lot of people would take the rewards, very, very few are willing or capable of putting in the work required. In a free market economy these things just sort themselves out. We end up with founders and CEOs who are happy to take those roles simply because the ones that aren't happy just won't go through with it. The best people in any role are those that have an almost irrational drive to be good at what they do. I feel that people like Tracy were dragged and forced through ordeals like this due to societal pressures but she would have been much happier in a role that allowed her to enjoy the other aspects of life (like childbirth).

We need to stop forcing equality in places where it doesn't belong. This woman felt like she needed to behave like a man: completely dedicated to the role, but her biology simply won't allow it. The sooner we accept that we can move on. Life is about making choices. You can't have your cake and eat it too. All adults have to understand this sooner or later. For the vast majority of women, happiness is going to come with having children. Let's stop encouraging women into career paths like this that ruin that for them.

> Someone I trusted had snuck out of responsibility in the most selfish way imaginable, and my body responded with intense physical reactions. I wondered if male CEOs would have reacted this way. I wish I knew.

She learned she was pregnant that morning so the physical reactions could have been lightly compounded by knowing that. While joyous there is some stress that comes with knowledge of pregnancy. Otherwise, yes, the reactions to betrayal are similar for males. It’s less about difference in sex and more about the person in how they respond to that specific form of stress.

I have no idea what this company does but her account of it is genuine, honest and makes me appreciate the true difficulty of being a female leader.

It's a bit unfortunate there isn't a government support for women in power to take with huge risks while bearing children. It's unclear as an outsider what a free market could do to help here and that's sad.

This is a good time to point out that the US is the only country in the world with no federally mandated parental leave of any kind. [1]

1 - https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jan/27/maternity-le...

Truly inspirational read. Keep up Tracy.

I wonder how much of this experience is as a female founder, or as a mother-founder.

I think a lot of the difficulties attributed to being a female in the workplace are much worse for mothers.

I had mixed feelings reading this. The writer seems an inspiring person, who went though a hard time having a baby. I feel less inspired when I see that even someone capable of such an amazing sequence of choices to create her own success, seems to succumb to the temptation to blame others for her own anger, both at externalities and at her own choices during early motherhood.

But I suppose it's also humanizing because stress affects even successful people. I guess I hoped that people who had made it world be better at this stuff... but that's probably just me hoping my own future success will make everything easy.

I like how she shares her journey even if I don't always agree with her reactions. It must have been really hard to go through what she went through. And that doesn't mean it was anyone else's fault or that it's just because she's a woman.

I think reaching for the "this happened because I'm a woman" model of the world is a mistake because it's probably not accurate and in any case if you believe that it's disempowering because, like, you just have to accept "well I'm a woman that's my lot now." And if you believe that and then can't do blissful acceptance, the only natural consolation from that position is to take out anger on others. Which is not healthy for them or for you.

That's a model of the world from which you can't make effective change so you're just left with anger at the difference between the way you want things and the way they are. blame and anger are tempting constellations but they don't help you make effective change and they speak out of powerlessness. so no individual is ever really powerless. it's okay to have those reactions of course it's normal and the choice comes in do we emphasize those and to what extent do we act on those and to what extent do we choose other actions and perspectives to emphasize. what leads to the best result for an individual?

must be quite the identity crisis to go from not being a mother to being a mother and then also from being a founder and CEO to feeling out of place as an employee and finally exiting. in such an experience where all your former pillars of self-identity I changed or move away it's challenging to work out your orientation in the world and who you are so it's natural to reach for something that seems secure and seems to offer consolation. but I would warn against reaching for something which is a temporary consolation and not a long-term empowering perspective. if I was in this position I believe the best thing for me would be to try to integrate all that I've learned about myself into a empowering perspective on myself in the world and when I felt confident in that and then I'd work out what I wanted to do next. John Lennon said "you say you want to change the world, why don't you free your mind instead."

I think we owe it to ourselves and to "our sons and daughters" to discourage people from adopting disempowering self-identities and perspectives and encourage them to adopt individually empowering ones. One of the things that can be emphasized by that, is personal responsibility. Another, as hinted by the writer, is managing emotions. I think another is owning emotions.

I especially liked this part, and found it very empowering, and in my experience it's one one right way, "What I have found is that I cannot stop myself from being human, but I can practice dialing down the duration of negative feelings like anger, fear, and sadness."

I agree we need to empower our next generation, but I don't agree with how you got there. First of all, I don't really see anything in her post that suggests she blamed others for her anger.

Secondly, I find it odd that you are so quick to disavow her experiences as being.. "because I'm a woman" considering that she is literally discussing an experience (pregnancy, birth, infertility, miscarriage) that only biological women experience. Almost by definition this experience she describes is because she is female.

I don't agree that it necessarily follows that acknowledging your gender (or other minority features) is disempowering. Unfortunately, the HN crowd tends to take an extraordinarily extreme view on this -- that it is only the case that women's experiences are purely interpretive, and that the only way to combat it is to pretend it doesn't exist. How odd is it that Lyft and Uber both exist, but its hard for us to imagine that the path to combatting oppression and finding self love within it can have different solutions?

Consider this: Tracy, in the beginning of this article, has actually done exactly what you've suggested: she has tried to empower herself by disassociating herself from her female identity. By her own conclusion, it did not ultimately bring her happiness. And it would be absurd of us to argue that we know her happiness better than herself.

Consider also this: men live a life deeply connected to their male identities, its just not as regularly analyzed as for the most part, a male identity is given standard.

I think, actually, most of us have grown up believing in our own power and that the world is fair. Then we experience the ways that its not and struggle with that powerlessness. Some of us grow resentful to the prior generations for not adequately bettering the world or preparing us for the ways the world is unjust. It is clear to me that this model doesn't work.

What if we empowered our kids by teaching them to love themselves and embrace their identities, rather than pretend they don't exist? What if we told them early on that the world is unjust and taught them to protect themselves?

> I agree ... but ....

I don't expect you to agree. In my experience, I expect us to have different views, that's OK. And it's likely we're misinterpreting each other's words...we each see there what we bring to it. It's not your responsibility if I misinterpret you, it's not my responsibility if you misinterpret me. In a way, that's more interesting, because instead of talking about topics and pretending, "I'm right", and pretending, "You're wrong", we get to just share and discuss and respond from each other's views. Stimulus, response.

> First of all, ... no blame for anger

I guess that’s how I feel when people complain about their own choices or the consequences of those.

The rest of your responses to my words misrepresent or misinterpret what I mean....

> Secondly, I find it odd ... because she is female.

I mean when bad things happen, don’t reach for the “this happened because I’m a woman”, because that’s disempowering.

> I don't agree that ... acknowledging your gender (or other minority features) is disempowering.

I mean, adopting a disempowering identity narrative ( that might include things like, “I’m a victim”, or “people are out to get me”, or “I’m inherently weak” ) is disempowering.

> Unfortunately, ... HN, purely interpretive, don't exist

I mean don't hide from what happens, what you chose, how you feel. Face that and choose a way to respond that empowers you.

> How odd is it that Lyft and Uber....self love, warrior

I’ll interpret as...you have to find self love through being a warrior against oppression. I don't think so. My view of self love, self worth, self respect is don’t rely on others for that. Be your own source.

I think if you do what I interpret you as saying, your self love might be based on trying to hurt others you decide are wrong and seeking approval from others you decide are right.

Actually, when you misinterpret what I wrote here in a way that seems, "You have to be an idiot or really bad to write that," I feel like hurting me because you've decided I'm wrong is what you're trying to do here...

> Consider ... Tracy

I mean face being a woman and write a powerful identity narrative about that. Dissociate yourself from disempowering fake victim narratives others seek to foist upon you.

> Consider ... men

It sounds like you reduce men or women to a label. Labels are not who you are. And it seems you’re saying, “Men uncritically accept whatever male identity they are given as an unearned entitlement.” Lets me feel like you lack empathy with the life of an individual deliberately creating their own identity through experience and effort, and are also willing to dismiss the identity development and the inner life of men, but...you’re all about combating not perpetrating oppression, right?

> I think, actually, most of us ... doesn't work.

I love this. Let me paraphrase to show some of my view.

I think, actually, most of us have grown up believing in our own power and that the world is fair. Then we experience the ways that its not and struggle with that powerlessness. Some of us then adopt disempowering fake victim narratives, blame others, and feel justified in taking out our anger on them, while others grow their effectiveness by using their choices and taking personal responsibility. In my experience, it is clear to me that this model of fake blame and victimhood doesn’t work.

> What if we empowered our kids by teaching them to love themselves and embrace their identities, rather than pretend they don't exist?

Agree, but let’s not tell them who they are. Encourage to develop empowering not disempowering identities, and not to think that labels are who they are. They get to choose who they are. Labels are just what describes things, doesn’t proscribe things.

> What if we told them early on that the world is unjust and taught them to protect themselves?

In my experience, I needed to keep a balance. Let's let them know how to protect themselves, and also know how beautiful it is, and show them you can create a great life through your own efforts. And more, what if instead of “teaching” them...we showed them. With our own behavior. Shared with them how we faced different situations, and what we tried, and how that went and what we felt. And let them decide? After all, we're not running their lives, who they are is not up to us. We're just there to help them grow, guide them towards the light, but not shape the form they will take. So we shouldn't be too quick to paint the world through the lens of our own suffering and joy, and not to say to them, "this is the real world, the one truth", because there's as many paths through the world as there are individuals in it. Be an individual.

I think one thing that's happening lately in the zeitgeist is the religion of labels. People need to form their own identity, the labels you use for me are not who I am. Just because old models of authority and morality are decaying (such as actual religions), doesn’t mean people can just invent their "religions" and force others to obey. Everyone who has the "black" label has to do "this" and is not allowed to do "that"? Crazy. Racist. Disempowering. Not freedom. Labels are not identity. You are not your labels. You are who you choose to be. Everyone can choose who they want to be. Write your own story.

Also, my feedback is, in disagreeing with my view...it seems you've misinterpreted what I'm saying not in a generous way...isn't it enough to share your view, disagree with mine, but without pretending you're better than someone else? If your world view was really working for you, why'd you have to compensate insecurity like that?

Anyway, thanks for the response and the chance to share my view...and be clear about it. I'm grateful for that and for knowing your view a bit more. I have way more to say about this, but I can't really say that such a response would be about what you've said. It's just a topic I'm really interested in. Wish you luck with what you're doing :)

Note to DS9 fans: this is not an essay from Salome Jens.

I'd be love to know more women that have the same tech interests and passions as me.

Unfortunately for me not only there aren't many, most of them see tech as something for nerds.

So please get more women into tech before I am too old :)

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