STFU About What Women Want | Hacker News Reader

STFU About What Women Want

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510 pointsmikeleeorg214 comments

There's a group in Toronto called Ladies Learning Code http://ladieslearningcode.com/. The group holds events for learning how to program and constantly sells out. Once while I was in Toronto, I walked into the event and it was so jammed pack that you couldn't walk from one side of the room to the other. The women were diverse and evenly distributed in age and ethnic background.

What interested me most is that the group session was held at 8 am on a Saturday. A couple of speculative thoughts later and it seemed to make sense to me. A lot of traditional developer events are held on weeknights and evenings and involve drinking at bars. If you're a woman with a family, it's probably preferable to carve out a Saturday morning, let your partner (hopefully, if you have one) take care of the kids and come home (not sloshed) to your family than it is to head down to the bar after work to have a couple of pints. It's just a lot more feasible.

Or more to the article's point, maybe that was just when the venue was available.

It is incredibly ironic that the top comment on an article blasting stereotypes is itself full of stereotypes.

Agreed. And would a man be welcome at such an event? Why name the event/group/org based off of a gender? Why not name it "learning code", and have marketing based towards women. Why exclude an entire gender, even if it is potentially already dominating the given market.

I personally am not a believer in excluding, to argue for including. It seems counter productive.

I think it's funny that you got hung up on the idea that it was a 'ladies only' event. I think the post you were replying to was referring to this part of the parent post:

  >  If you're a woman with a family, it's probably
  > preferable to carve out a Saturday morning, let your
  > partner (hopefully, if you have one) take care of the
  > kids and come home (not sloshed) to your family than
  > it is to head down to the bar after work to have a
  > couple of pints. It's just a lot more feasible.

Obviously the only thing that is holding women back from going to other tech events is that the schedules aren't 'family friendly.' This conclusion would only make sense to me if there were some evidence presented that most/all of the women at the event had families of their own.

A fairly large number of women coders have children for much the same reasons a lot of professional women have children in general. Also, many women don't like attending male dominated events because of how poorly they are treated by a small minority of men (or drunk men) at those events. I have no idea which is more important, but I don't think they are care just as long something they are doing works.

PS: People are lumping in 'nerdy' activity's when think it's a little more general than that. You can make attending a gun show a lot more inviting to women based on the same basic ideas.

Thanks for bringing this up -- it frustrates me when people correlate making things more female friendly with supporting children, flexible work hours, etc. Guess what? Men have kids too! And, there's a lot of women who don't have or don't want children (like the author of the piece). This topic gets a lot of attention, but I think there are many other issues.

>Why exclude an entire gender, even if it is potentially already dominating the given market.

Because it's dominating the given market. I don't see anything on their website specifically banning men, though. They probably just cater to women.

How is excluding a dominate group beneficial? I find groups based on gender and race to be questionable. Leave the segregation in the 20th century. How are we to break stereotypes if people keep on grouping themselves into groups defined by what they claim to want to overcome? To me it seems ironic at least. Let's focus on the root issues and solve them organically.

The root issue is that women are being treated unfairly in a certain market. To alleviate this, some women have come together with ladies-specific events within this market. This way, women can progress while fighting against discrimination.

The main problem with the way you're thinking is you're ignoring the inequality and acting like a women-specific programming event is exactly the same as a men-specific event.

While I'd agree that the root cause is unfair treatment, "ladies-specific events" only server to further divide groups. I like the parent's use of "organic" - let's keep the doors open to everyone, and let the system reach equilibrium on its own.

Keep the doors open to everyone? Have you talked to actual women about their experiences in tech? I have for many years, and I tell you true: open doors are not what all of them are seeing.

I'd like to see your evidence that women-specific events only serve to further divide groups. The participants I've talked to see it as an opportunity to learn new skills in a safe environment. Skills that they then go out and apply at regular companies. It's not like they then go on to work at women-only companies and then found women-only startups themselves, after all.

My wording may have been off. By "keep open" I didn't mean to imply that all doors were open - just that we should make an active effort to prevent doors from closing.

And women-specific events reinforce a divided image by presenting the events as specific to a group. It highlights a division between groups, and not based on a functional difference relevant to the field. What's different from a women-specific coding meetup and a meetup open to all? I can see sexual harassment / feeling out of place as something that may happen. And that sucks. But retreating to exclusive events (in name and branding at least) is not the solution.

I realize this is a bit pedantic, but the event is not exclusive, and it is open to all. They welcome men to the event as well, they just advertise it to encourage more women to come.

The difference is absolutely relevant to the field to the extent that men and women have different experiences in the field. E.g.: http://people.mills.edu/spertus/Gender/why.html Pretending otherwise won't get us anywhere.

You're certainly entitled to your opinion that somebody else's solution to a problem you don't have is wrong. But unless you're planning on doing something better, I'm not sure why you think your opinion is relevant. As with any open-source project, "patches welcome" is the order of the day.

Ok, skipping issues of fairness for a moment because I think they are unhelpful because one cannot actually discuss them objectively.....

The argument for excluding a dominant group would be that people in a non-dominant group may have a different perspective that might otherwise be drowned out. Trying to ensure that one has a strong majority locally in an industry-wide minority can provide a space for a different kind of social interaction. Heck if other coding workshops occur without many (if any) women, then very often times you can get the guy-interactions going anyway.

I think the same does apply to ethnic groups. And it's not a matter of systematic exclusion so much as its an issue. The issue is social and cultural space.

The answer to the question of "how to get more women into tech" is simply "get more women into tech" — if women see other women in the tech industry, they'll be more likely to perceive it as a viable career path, and their numbers will go up.

But when you have the present situation — where women are still a minority — it's hard to start that positive feedback loop. Women don't see other women in tech, so they're less likely to see it as a potential career path, and their numbers stagnate.

So the idea behind an event like this is to help break the perception that "women don't do tech." If you have a concentrated event with lots of women programmers, women are more likely to show up just because they see at as an event they are welcomed at.

Having an all-womens' programming event also helps alleviate a lot of the pressures that prevent women from showing up at coed events. Ask a female programmer you know about how it felt showing up at their university's computer club, or a hackathon, when they were still relatively inexperienced: they'll probably attest to feeling as if they needed to "prove" their geek credentials, or they'll talk about being afraid of looking like some incompetent girl (as opposed to simply incompetent). All-female tech events help women build up confidence so that they feel "equipped" when/if they choose to tackle the larger tech community.

Hi there! I'm Heather, the founder of Ladies Learning Code. Men are welcome at our events, and we have had a few men attend each workshop. The name was designed to be a specific invitation to women, but we don't exclude men. (That being said, I personally support the idea of separate men's groups and women's groups in general, so I encourage someone to start "Men Learning Code" if they are so inclined.

Let's try this in reverse:

"Women are welcome at our events, and we have had a few women attend each workshop. The name was designed to be a specific invitation to men, but we don't exclude women. (That being said, I personally support the idea of separate women's groups and men's groups in general, so I encourage someone to start "Women Learning Code" if they are so inclined."

I'd just like to point out, without opinion one way or the other, that I believe the above paragraph would cause major outrage and claims of sexism and separatism, along with "this is why there are so few women in software".

I have to point out that this exercise makes no sense (at least not to me).

Taking a minority empowerment effort and turning the tables around will obviously emulate a majority empowerment effort which is matter of fact an empowerment of prejudice.

If a minority group is not biased, then they have failed and will not have an effect in the status quo.

Ok, now make it a nursing seminar, or an education seminar directed toward men. No outcry of sexism. See how that works?

I actually hadn't thought of this. So it's okay to do this because of the idea that most men are not interested in nursing, and most women are not interested in programming?

I think it's more along the lines of:

It's ok to discriminate when you're trying to target/encourage a specific minority (i.e. women in software), but it's not ok when you're targetting a majority, because it looks like you're trying to encourage the majority while discouraging the minority

Whether or not people say this out loud, or think it consciously is a different question.

"Ladies Learning Code" is discriminatory towards men, but it's less of an issue because it is in the furtherance of encouraging a minority (women) into the field. On the other hand, "Men Learning Code" seemingly discourages women, who are already in the minority.

This is very close to my feeling too. The "principled irate male" demographic tends to get upset over the double standard. But it's all a big case of a bad optimization metric.

The point to organiations like this isn't to eliminate "discrimination" in the abstract. It's to eliminate the inequality of opportunity. There is a very large practical and moral difference between being excluded from a single meeting of techincal people and being excluded from (or have limited access to) an entire career path. Spending a few "discrimination" points on the former to reduce the cases of the latter seems like a good idea to me.

Thank you, ajross and pyre, for clearly and reasonably explaining why this sort of targeted marketing is not also discrimination (the bad kind).

(Yes, upvotes say this too, but now that votes are not public, I wanted there to be a visible commendation. These sorts of things set the tone of the thread.)

That sounds implicitly like most other programming / software / engineering workgroups out there, to be honest. With the exception of hackerspaces, which in my city seem to successfully remain relatively gender-neutral and respectful.

Yes, I think you're right that the default expectation is the modified paragraph - which is why it's necessary to create organizations like Ladies Learning Code that explicitly contradict that.

I would submit that events restricted to members of a certain class are not in and of themselves evil. If someone sets up a workshop for “Right-Handed People Learning Code”, I as a left-handed person would not react with outrage.

But when members of one class are systematically excluded from some role in society, exclusionary events are a problem if they contribute to that system. A workshop for “Men Learning Code” is a bad idea... and so is a workshop for “Women Learning To Teach Preschool”.

I think "Gentlemen Learning Code" would be a great name for such a workshop. And we would wear monocles and brown tweed. It would be both educational and ironically hip!

In all seriousness though, LLC is doing some great stuff, and I'm glad to see it getting some recognition here.

yeah, but then that's classist!

As tempting as it is to simply look at the raw facts, context does matter in a situation like this. The software industry is still male-dominated, and that can be intimidating and draining for people who are not male.

Have you ever gone to events where you're the odd one out? Its not a comfortable experience, and even if you force yourself to keep going back, it takes an emotional toll. Think of events like these as a harbor for them to recharge at.

I'd also note that the group isn't exclusionary. They do allow men. They just cater to women. As much as I'd like these types of group to be unnecessary, I'd still say their existence is valid.

Have you ever gone to events where you're the odd one out?

Yes. At the last two companies I've worked at, I've been the only non-Indian. I also live in India more than half the time (my current company is based there). When I'm in the US, I practice FMA, and I'm often the only non-Filipino in the room. I plan to travel to Cebu city soon to kick up my training, and I'll likely be the only white guy in my gym. At a yoga class, I'm often the only man.

Does this make me the "odd one out"? I could choose to view things that way, but I don't. At work I might be the only white guy, but we are all there to build a great product. At FMA, we are all there to learn how to kick ass. At yoga, we are all there to become stronger and more flexible.

If you attend tech events and focus on the differences between yourself and everyone else, you'll feel left out. And you'll have no one to blame but yourself.

This is a great point. "Feeling" excluded is often how you view the situation.

I had an Asian friend tell me he doesn't like travelling in the southern states (particularly small towns) because people stare at him. He views this as racist behavior.

I told him that they stare at me too. I'm a middle-aged white guy, but I'm obviously not from the south either. He views it as being a race issue where I view it as being an outsider issue. Bothers him, doesn't bother me.

Same can be said of women who feel they are being excluded. I've worked with groups of women and often one will feel the environment is "unfriendly" while the other women say it's one of the most inclusive environments they've encountered.

What's the saying? "Nothing is good or bad, but thinking makes it so"

I think the key difference between your situation at your company and women in tech is that your situation is not systematic. There are a lot of other male, white role models doing startups, and they are very visible.

There are very few white male role models in Filipino Martial Arts. The only one I can think of with any visibility is Matt Damon, and he's hardly an expert [1].

In spite of that, I'm not the odd man out. Instead of thinking "omfg, I don't have slanty eyes like these guys what'll I do", I'm thinking "I'm a bit taller than most of these guys, how can I use this to my advantage?"

[1] FMA looks distinctly different from Chinese/Japanese/Korean arts. To distinguish the genetically modified supersoldiers in The Bourne Identity from regular people, the director had them all learn a bit of FMA.

Which is why I limited my response to the situation at your company.

I could hypothesize on why you don't feel uncomfortable in the other situations you described, but really it's your own personal experience, and there's no reason to assume your feelings would generalize to everyone in that experience. I see the analogy you're trying to make, but I do not think it applies to women in technology, because there are a lot of other factors (stereotypes of computer scientists, the "brogramming" culture, the fact that you are going to classes in the US [I assume] not in the Phillipines, meaning you are still part of the dominant majority, etc).

I did wonder whether I should post the comment. Take a look at the site. The photos show how many folks showed up at the event. Guys aren't prohibited and in fact are often leading the seminars.

Stereotypes or not, the format works. When I go to traditional developer meetups only single women who aren't moms tend to show up. You have to, at some point, wonder whether the format of the events has something to do with the low turnout of women.

But yeah, let's focus on the stereotypes. I've been here long enough with a low karma that I don't really worry too much any more about being controversial.

I think this is different than stereotyping, though.

One thing is to say "women today ditch startups because of children, so women don't really want to do startups because they'd rather have children instead". This is stereotyping.

Something along the lines of "we want to improve women attendance; today women might not be able to attend at night events because they have children; let's put it on saturday morning and see if it works" is not stereotyping IMO. It's looking at (apparent) causes and try to find a solution to work on them.

Causes don't go away just because you don't want to stereotype. If you want to make a lasting change in the mindset you need to find ways to attract more women, working against what might impede them in today's society. You have to start somewhere, and I think this is a good place to start.

EDIT: typos.

How are the two any different? The first isn't stereotyping at all, it's just stating a causal fact. The second is a solution to that fact.

Generalizing isn't stereotyping, if it's a largely correct generalization.

While neither is a stereotype, the second part of the first one ("so women don't really want to do startups because they'd rather have children instead") is ascribing a motivation that does not necessarily follow from the first part.

Semantics over a poor choice of words. I took the OP and the original TFA to mean "women, more so than men, choose family over careers. that doesn't mean they didn't want their career, just that they ultimately chose a different path instead.

Honesty is better. Whether confirming a stereotype. Or breaking it.

Of course there's a flipside to this assumption: the weeknight meetings at bars are packed with negligent fathers.

As a father and co-founder of a startup, I can tell you that what fathers are in attendance feel negligent. It's a real problem with the industry.

This is my general impression too, though I doubt it's limited to the industry.

I am a single father who takes full responsibility for my son every other week. I have since he was born. I don't receive any benefits (formal or not) that are not otherwise offered to mothers. The system as we have designed it is not family-friendly - no matter whether you're a mother or father.

Side note: That site is incredibly well designed. The color scheme is aesthetically pleasing as well as fits the theme (yes, ladies=pink themed. get over it). The navigation is easy to understand and use. The text is well organized, easy to read, and well written. It is elegant in its simplicity yet completely functional. Also, another huge plus is that the social links are re-designed to fit the color scheme and are much less obnoxious (in fact not obnoxious at all).

I know this is probably totally off topic but thought it was interesting enough to mention. Kudos to the developer.

Thanks, skizm! The site was designed by @vivianhui (her company is @studiofunction). It was developed by @bgilham from @theworkinggroup. We get quite a few compliments on it!

Oh, and it's purple, not pink. ;)

Heather Founder, Ladies Learning Code

sigh still to point out. As a father, and a startup enthusiast, I think the same problem applies to both sexes. Women have the problem of actually carrying the child, and post birth. In that case... sorry there's that one year time when you would have to be on lower stress of the startup spectrum. However good thing about your 20s and 30s is you have plenty of time. In that base, just carve out a year or two for kids, and spend the rest of the time like I do on startups. I love my daughter, and she is not holding me back, in fact she is motivation. Like everyone in a startup will tell you, kids come first, male or female. I would never advocate for a male to ignore their kids and work on a startup. How is that any different than a female? You rely on your partner in all cases. The game changes for a single parent, its hard, but its equally tough for men and women.

I always find it weird when people say "what women want". As a man, I find it easiest to illustrate the problem to other men by simply asking them to substitute 'man' for 'woman'.

Who can say "what men want". Sure, if you listen to comedians, all men want is sex sex sex and maybe some cars and sports.

But even before you look at what individuals are like, if you just look at male archetypes, there are clear and common contradictions. The 98-pound weakling versus the musclebound beach bum. The hot stuff young programmer and the technically clueless grayhair. The expensively dressed high finance wizard and the smelly protesting hippy. The sex-mad pickup artist and the asexual man who simply isn't interested. The sports-mad bloke who hates literature and the literature-mad bloke who hates sports. The deadbeat dad versus the father who lives solely for his children.

And these are just archetypes, not actual individuals. They all have different wants, needs, skills, and desires. How stupid it is to say "what men want", to lump half the race into one generalisation. If you're a man, you should feel viscerally just how bad this kind of generalisation is; why should women feel any different when the same is applied to them?

I don't think the archetypes correspond to 'what people want'. The 98-pound weakling may be playing world of warcraft all day telling everyone he is a muscle bound beach head for example. People often want what they are not, "The grass is always greener".

There is an artificial idealization of a 'Man' and an idealization of a 'Woman' in almost all societies around the world. The closeness of the individual to the idealization doesn't always change their want for the idealization. This is how we get media that often portrays the 'ideals' in various forms. People live vicariously through that which they want to be but aren't willing to work to be.

This might be accurate with some people, but it can't be applied to everyone. I am working towards everything I want, and honestly I think the journey is much more desirable then the end result. A big part of Zen is killing your ego, and I think this is a very powerful mentality to have.

I certainly wasn't intending this post to apply to 'everyone', that is a silly claim to make. However generalizations about a group are often valuable. In the NH context there are articles about A:B testing a UI all the time which gives you generalization of your target users. Just like years of show testing has provided TV channels generalization of their audience. I probably read at least 3-5 'interesting statistics' posts a week on HN that are all about generalizing a group. Why? because this is in fact valuable information, especially for the target audience of HN. Understanding what a populous 'generally' wants and does is a huge first step to providing a solution to a problem.

I find it easiest to illustrate the problem to other men by simply asking them to substitute 'man' for 'woman'.

There's a great Chrome extension 'Jailbreak the Patriarchy' that does that to web pages. http://www.daniellesucher.com/2011/11/jailbreak-the-patriarc...

It's a fascination brain hack to "see how the other half lives". If you're a programmer interested in this whole field of gender/sexism, it's very eye-opening tool to use.

Second this, on behalf of my wife, who is a theoretical physicist. Most women also don't want to do physics, because they'd rather have babies, or so she's always been told. And got passed over for a grant because she had a husband and therefore didn't need the money. I'm still pissed, not least because she's naive enough to believe it's right for her to be treated this way.

My grandmother was a theoretical physicist (G. R. Caughlin, co-author of the FCZ papers on element formation in stars). She found it difficult to succeed as a woman in physics. She also raised four kids (without child care). She taught at Montana State University, Caltech, and others, and worked with Willie Fowler, Fred Hoyle, and other great minds of her day.

However, having talked to women in academic sciences today, she had it easy. No long post-doc programs, tenure was an easier process, and so forth. I hear over and over from such women that they have to choose between having the family life they want and a tenure track. This is an indication of an institutional barrier to women in the field (as is your wife being passed up for the grant).

These are the sort of things that need to be fixed. I am afraid simply asking how we encourage interest among women will make the problem worse because it will make the positions more competitive and hence lead to longer post-doc programs and more family sacrifices in order to achieve tenure.

This gets back to my point. Focus on institutional issues only and stop worrying about outreach.

> choose between having the family life they want and a tenure track

This is probably true to some extent for men too. Ultimately, the only biological difference is that men can delay family life longer with less risk of infertility (provided they have a younger partner).

>Most women also don't want to do physics, because they'd rather have babies, or so she's always been told.

Do you actually think this is not the case? The claimed causation seems weird, but it's clearly true that most women don't want to do physics (neither do most men, but even on top of that, certainly far fewer women than men want to). And I expect that most women want to have babies (though a lower percentage than those who don't want to do physics).

>And got passed over for a grant because she had a husband and therefore didn't need the money.

That sucks and is awful and wrong. I don't think it disproves the claim in the first sentence of your article though. Nor should it be justified thereby; your wife clearly does want to do physics if she's applying for grants, so it shouldn't apply to her.

Do you actually think this is not the case?

Jesus - seriously? Of course I think it's not the case. My wife, a theoretical physicist, has two children. These are not mutually exclusive goals in life, and it's incredible to me - and I truly mean this in the nicest possible way, because you're asking honestly and I respect that - that an adult in the twenty-first century could honestly believe that it even should be a choice, let alone that people (even women) make such a choice.

It blew my mind when all the male physicists thought that too - it blew my wife's mind, actually, because she thinks physicists think more clearly than other people (yes, I love her dearly, but I do have to remind her that physicists are still primates).

Everybody wants to have babies. Seriously. It's pretty much built into the low-level code. It's not exclusive to women. If there are fewer women in physics (and there are) then it is far, far more due to the fact that the field is really and truly knife-in-the-back hostile to women than that women choose to have babies "instead".

My wife went to grad school with a bunch of really nice guys. Lifetime friends kind of guys. And they still couldn't quite wrap their heads around the fact that she was female and still really deeply into theoretical particle physics.

Sure, it's interfered with her career for real reasons - kids have interfered with my own career, and that's just reality - but nobody says I'm not dedicated enough to my career because I chose to have kids. So why is that? It's simply because I'm male. Nothing more.

The truth is, a lot of the philosophy of the academic system is due to the monasteries that preceded it. If you're not married to God (I mean, "physics") then you don't truly love it. Which is balderdash, of course - but academics are some of the most sexist people in the world, and truly believe the place of the faculty wife is in the kitchen and picking the kids up at school, while her husband is doing all the smart stuff eighteen hours a day and getting ahead. Hell, even Einstein was a pig in that sense, but he was at least born in the nineteenth century and had an excuse.

Since we are on that 21st century stuff... No, not everybody wants to have babies.

I never did. Sure, I have my occasional moments where I go all gooey - but overall, I stand by that choice. And so do plenty of other women.

Having kids thankfully is a choice these days. I respect people who choose to have them - I'd appreciate it if that was a mutual courtesy.

Edit: Fixed mark-up. Glad that there are so many ways to emphasize text that every website gets to pick their own ;)

But do you appreciate being asked to make a choice between children and career? I think that's a big problem that few people are willing to address.

No, I don't. At all. I was specifically pointing out the "_everybody_ wants to have kids" line. It's not everybody.

But yes, having to make that choice is bad. For both men and women. It's usually worse for women - men can, from what I've seen, have kids (well, by proxy ;) and have it not impact their career too badly.

Bah. You can choose not to have children and still acknowledge that the urge to procreate isn't any more a female thing than the urge to succeed is male.

Both Klein and Trunk seem to be missing the point that just because women are choosing do X instead of Y doesn't mean there's no sexism in the Y.

Anyway, to me the arguments here about babies and startups are eerily reminiscent of the arguments against women becoming professors. Stuff like: women want to have babies, how will they advise their students when they're pregnant? They can't bring in grant money for a whole two years! Blah blah blah. Think of our academic standards.

Fortunately that argument has been thoroughly debunked by the large number of successful female professors who are also mothers. Frankly, I don't buy the argument that having a pregnant co-founder hurts a startup. If women can get tenure at a top-10 university while raising a kid, I'm pretty sure they can also keep your startup going while raising a kid.

EDIT: Heh, I've been downvoted. Why am I not surprised?

It really depends on how you plan to run your startup. If you require 80 hour weeks then no, a women with a young child isn't going to cut it. However, neither is a man with a young child.

If you are demanding that working for your startup is your employee's number 1 priority then you probably only want a specific type of person--young and single (male or female).

However, if you run a more sane company married with 3 kids would probably work fine.

If you require 80 hour weeks then no, a women with a young child isn't going to cut it. However, neither is a man with a young child.

There is one difference, though: Males are more likely to postpone having kids for the sake of their career -- because men are biologically more likely to be able to postpone having kids. For a 35 year old childfree woman, having kids is practically "now or never"; for a 35 year old childfree man, having kids is simply a matter of waiting until the right moment and then finding an appropriately-aged woman.

Well just like the pill, science can come to our rescue over here too. As the costs associated with cryonically storing tissue drops with improvement in technology and methodology, sooner or later it will be possible for almost all women to get their eggs stored for later use in their 20s.

Just imagine the tectonic shift that will take place when this happens. It will change the world in such a deep way that the pill will pale in comparison. Maybe future generations past that point will see such discussions as a symptom of a primitive society.

If she has frozen eggs, can a woman still carry a child post menopause? Or does she have to resort to a surrogate?

Yes, she can. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pregnancy_over_age_50

Not that I encourage this particular lifestyle, but some people do manage to do this successfully. John Carmack, for instance, works 40 hours per week on iD, 40 hours per week on Armadillo, and still manages to raise two children.

I agree, it can be done, but if he is really working 80 hours per week most weeks (it's different if maybe he is constantly taking vacations or something), then I wouldn't really call that raising two children. I'd say his wife is raising them, and he sees them occasionally on weekends. This some kind of value judgment, just looking at the amount of time in a week, and there's no way it's enough for both.

Right... I have a small child and I actually do my fair share of raising her.

And I generally don't sleep more than 5-6 hours a night (sometimes much less), or watch any TV, or even waste much time online anymore -- and I track it with RescueTime -- but getting 40 hours a week of real work done is still hard some weeks.

Raising kids -- doing it right, that is -- takes a lot of time & interaction. Then there's time keeping the house functioning & relatively clean, paying bills, grocery shopping, the various trivial little tasks that need doing...

I'm pretty sure 80 hours a week would be impossible unless I stopped sleeping altogether. Even once my daughter is in school, it'd be pretty rough going.

My understanding is that he works 13-14 hours per day, 6 days per week, and he takes Sundays off entirely for family time:

"I still work 80 hours a week," he admitted to Mark Lisheron of the Austin American-Statesman. "It used to be 80 hours on software, now it's 40 hours on software and 40 hours on Armadillo." Carmack did ease up a bit after he and his wife, Anna Kang, had their first child in 2004—he was getting home from the office at about midnight instead of 2:00 AM or 3:00 AM. Kang, however, insists that Sunday is family day, so Carmack compromises by reading technical manuals to his infant son.

ref. http://www.notablebiographies.com/news/A-Ca/Carmack-John.htm...

"Fortunately that argument has been thoroughly debunked by the large number of successful female professors who are also mothers."

The argument hasn't been debunked. I don't have the facts to back this up, but I'd guess that on average, men work more hours per year than women with the same jobs, because women tend to give birth and take care of children more than men. The reason there are so many successful female professors is because we've decided as a society that optimizing for hours worked per year is a bad idea with detrimental effects on our lives.

If someone were choosing between a man and a woman of equal skill to work at a startup, wanted to maximize hours worked per year, and didn't care about the law or the effects of their decision on society, they'd pick the man. Fortunately, there are far better indicators than gender of how prone an individual is to take extended leave.

Also from what I have heard is that in the sciences, it is extraordinarily hard to succeed as a professor and a mother at the same time unless you simply don't want to take time off to spend with your newborn and expect your kid to be factory-farmed.

Edit: What's up with the downvotes? It seems like they go up and down this thread largely randomly. Are people just downvoting things they disagree with?

Because it would be TOTALLY OUTRAGEOUS to expect a father to participate equally in the raising of his child.

The reason why this is off-base would take more time to get into than I have. Suffice it to say however, that the inequality goes both ways, and bringing fathers up to the same level of rights in deciding whether to become parents that mothers have is not going to happen. Fathers are legally and socially secondary parents and I think women would rebel very strongly if full equality in all aspects of deciding what level of responsibility to take on regarding children was at issue.

I'm sorry, I can't help but read this as "men cannot have abortions, therefore they should not be expected to have to raise their children."

I am sure that that is not what you are trying to say. Could you maybe explain why it is that man cannot have an equal (or larger) part in raising their children?

Actually abortion is part of it (i.e,. no equivalent opt-out for economic reasons) but where the parents have never been married, you also have the fact that over half of never-married mothers never seek child support.

This means that never-married fathers have few if any rights that are not contingent first on responsibilities, while never-married mothers control the legal process every step of the way. In fact, the mother is not (and cannot be) legally required even to inform the father that he is a father and can hence give up the child for adoption without the father being able to assert custody.

There is no solution to this problem (of equality in parenting for never-married couples) that we as a society can live with, so it is then obvious that fathers cannot be legally or socially equal parents.

Now among married couples this comes into play too but differently. If a woman has an affair and gets pregnant by another man and the husband doesn't find out about it for, say, 3 years, the child is legally his and even if they divorce he may have to support someone else's child.

This means that for women, motherhood is both a biological and social fact, but for men fatherhood is purely a social/legal fact.

BTW, this also raises interesting issues--- it means that because as men and women can never be equal parents in our society, the ways in which we enforce this also mean that same-sex couples can not be fully equal to opposite-sex couples--- they either end up legally favored or disfavored depending on how presumption of paternity works in a given state.

Ok, so women can't be professors because of abortion and false paternity? Really?

No. Women have trouble getting through the tenure track in sciences because the institutional structures weed them out, not taking into account family life desires. Simply saying "fathers should be equal parents" glosses over that entirely.

It would be far better to ensure that taking a year or two off would allow smooth resumption of the tenure track. That's the fix.

When I read it, the message I took away was that current sexist gender roles tend to force men into being breadwinners as opposed to caregivers. Women being a breadwinner with a male caregiver is still looked upon as kind-of curious in certain parts. It's regrettable because it limits flexibility for all the wrong reasons, especially for people in an industry where things like telecommuting are possible.

Of course, then einhverfr went on to the whole abortion/child-support/false-paternity thing, so I don't know anymore.

I don't see you as entirely off base either.

The thing is, our economy is based on two fundamental assumptions:

1) Labor and capital are separate. Capital hires labor. 2) Labor works outside the home, capital can control things.

The second problem arises pretty clearly (and intractably) from the sort of worker protection laws that Belloc describes in "The Servile State." I.e., by treating employees as the responsibility of the employer, you have serious issues regarding workers comp and so forth when an employee is working outside of an environment that the employer controls.

The example Belloc gives is this:

A farmer hires two men to dig a well. The first is being lowered into the hole by the second and he lets the rope slip and the first worker is injured. If all three were independent agents, the first worker's lawsuit would be against the second worker, but instead it is the employer who is responsible. So this leads to an employer legally compelled to control the workplace. Things like telecommuting are challenging this but only seem to work in certain narrow domains.

So a lot of kinds of work cannot be done in the home for this sort of reason. This means that family life cannot be integrated with work life and therefore must be separate.

To me the answer is to recognize that a labor/capital divide in context with fundamental differences in the nature of motherhood and fatherhood, leads to economic discrimination against women. If we recognize that, then we can challenge that divide and build a more just economy based on smaller units where work life and family life are not so separate.

So these are all pieces of a very complex cultural phenomenon.

It's hardly outrageous. If a woman finds a man willing to do this, she has every right to marry him and have him participate equally in the raising of the child.

Has anyone advocated against this?

for some odd reason, that is harder than you'd think. :(

I'd guess that on average, men work more hours per year than women with the same jobs, because women tend to give birth and take care of children more than men.

I can't help but wonder if this is significantly influenced by an imbalance in compensation.

When my daughter was born, my wife and I decided that one of us would stay home, and income was certainly a large factor in determining that she would be the one to stay home. If our incomes had been reversed, then I would have become a stay-at-home dad.

The way you frame it is a catch-22 but data shows that when matched for age, marital status, and children single women with no children make more money than their male counterpart.

As soon as a man becomes married this switches. A man is more likely to take on extra hours/responsibilities and a woman is more likely to work part-time at this point. It's the over-time and hazard pay that is associated with the wage gap. A person working 80 hours per week should not have the same hourly-wage as someone working 30 hours per week regardless of gender.

Even if this were true, it doesn't mean that men get more stuff done. I' be interested in a study that measures the difference in job performance for equal compensation levels between men and women. Even that study might be biased because there's some evidence that if a woman and a man perform at exactly the same level, men get better ratings, but it would be better than simply measuring hours "worked".

I also think throwing in statements that disparage women with the caveat that "I don't have the facts to back this up" is irresponsible and contributes to the sexism problem.

If you view my assertion as "disparagement," you've inferred malice where there was none. There's nothing disparaging about what I said. Yes, the assertion points out differences between sexes, so it is "sexist." So is pointing out that women tend to breast feed more than men.

In my opinion, pointing out my own lack of a citation is a better practice than making uncited claims of fact. It's an invitation to prove me wrong, but the lack of a citation in itself doesn't make me wrong.

There's a difference between these three statements:

1. Women and men are different - obviously true and too vague to be meaningful.

2. Women have breasts while men do not - obviously true and mostly (and hopefully) irrelevant to this discussion.

3. Women work fewer hours than men - A specific claim about women that may be used by some to justify their prejudices against women. I don't doubt that you made the claim without malice, but unfortunately these are the kinds of remarks that reinforce sexist stereotypes. For this reason, I wish people wouldn't make such claims unless there is watertight evidence backing these claims.

This is madness. Breasts and uteri are relevant to this discussion. They set a lower bound on how much time a woman can take off when a couple has children. The lower bound for men is zero. My claim is that all other things being equal, this higher lower bound makes it likely that women take more time off of work. This is not guaranteed, but it's a fairly reasonable, uncontroversial conclusion. There's nothing wrong with clearly labeled conjecture, and I welcome hard evidence either way.

"Women work fewer hours than men - A specific claim about women that may be used by some to justify their prejudices against women."

From my original comment: "Fortunately, there are far better indicators than gender of how prone an individual is to take extended leave." Choosing a man over a woman based on gender alone isn't just bad for society; it's poor reasoning.

I'm stunned by the sexism in your response.

The lower bound for men is zero.

Maybe it is zero for men who expect their wives to do all the parenting. It's certainly not zero for everyone else.

Let's compromise. So, if he (I'll assume it's "he") concedes there are a lot of shitty fathers out there, can the fact 0 is a valid value in the range (and thus forming the lower bound) just be considered a fact and not a sexist remark? And since some time off is required at the very least to give birth (something a male couldn't do), the lower bound for women would be greater than 0?

Objectively, his bounds make sense. You may not like what that data means, but that in and of itself doesn't make him sexist.

The lower bound for women is essentially zero, especially when considered in the context of an entire career (i believe a women could conceivably only be away from work for six weeks). Do you really think six weeks accounts for the difference in pay, prestige, etc between men and women's careers?

Women do often end up taking much more time off, but it is absolutely not clear that has anything to do with "breasts and uteri". I would argue it's cultural.

If women can get tenure at a top-10 university while raising a kid.

If by raising you mean outsourcing to a factory farm....

The fact is that today it's getting harder and harder for women to both have careers and raise their kids (instead of outsourcing that to day care centers and the like).

You say this as if men haven't "outsourced" their child care for pretty much all of history.

Families outsourcing child care though is very recent. I, for one, am not a fan of factory farming our kids (and it's one reason why I, as a man, work from home).

Providing counterexamples to a generalization is not a debunking.

Every stat I run into on the matter shows career focused women being less likely to have children or have them much later in life. Apparently there is a limiting resource whether it is time, money, or energy.

What you think women want is clearly not what women want, because you're only one woman, and women are complex and varied, and want different things.

Also, I want a different thing to what you want, and lots of women want what I want. So you are twice as wrong! Not only for assuming other women want what you want, but also that you want what other women want!

Ahem. Now that "want" and "women" have started sounding less like words and more like an arbitrary sequence of sounds, is anyone willing to contribute actual science to the discussion? People yelling at each other "women are like me!" "no, women are like me!" has, I fear, outlived its usefulness.

Are there any studies covering, say, startup success by founder gender? Any documentation on attrition rates from school -> university -> startup? Has anyone even been bothered to go out and survey the attitudes of women towards startups rather than just projecting out their own?

Rather than shutting up about what women want, I think a better idea would be to actually find out what women want. Gender balance is clearly an issue in the startup community, and not talking about it isn't likely to help. Are there few women because women don't want startups, or because startups don't want women?

I don't know, but there comes a point where more opinions are not useful.

Whats the problem with having babies? Its not impossible to continue working and taking care of babies, after the first year or so. During that year your husband can take the work or someone you hire. Big deal.

This argument what woman want is kind of sexist, since nobody talked what men want before. Do whatever the fuck you want and stfu, gay, lesbian or baby-creator.

What if most women want to take care of their own babies?

Hell I'm a guy and I'm dreaming about downshifting or even ending my career when kids start coming. I have seen consumerist/careerist families and I believe I can do better.

I actually WANT my kids to be raised in an atmosphere of (material) scarcity to the point that I could do without major wealth or if I acquired it I would "hide" it from them.

I must be batshit crazy huh?

Who says you cant bring your child to work?

False dichtomy "careerist" "or" "family". Modern family can evolve to just as other relationships. It is very frightening for a child to be left at a day-care center, it would be much better if the parents could bring their children to work and have an "office" only for kids. Hire a baby-sitter and you are all set. Work and family.

Don't tell me this and that as reasons why it cant work. It works for me and my coworkers just fine.

Very much agreed with gp on downshifting career when having kids -- that's what I've done.

I'm less convinced about bringing the child to work, mostly because I've never been in a workplace where I've seen that, so it's tough to imagine.

Can you elaborate on that (or do you or a co-worker have a blog post, article, etc. about your experience)? Can you run though a typical day?

I work remotely, entirely, as does my wife. Obviously, this is one way to solve that problem, but it's not possible for most people, and the startup I work with is thinking about setting up offices, etc..

Child comes with the parent and sits or sleeps in his small chair in the parents office. When the child wakes up or wants something, the parent gives it to him like any other person that comes into the office and wants something. Usually the baby is happy if he can get a toy or push the chair around a bit. The baby also likes to have his father in clear sight when in his chair with toys.

For the father it means he gives attention to the child from time to time, but he can still get his job done.

Once he was on phone with a key account manager on the other side, the baby started crying for attention or something, the key account manager heard and asked if he needs a minute or two... he took the baby in his arm and continued the conversation while the baby tryed to smack him, thats how it looked like. Very funny and uplifted the whole conversation.

I imagine for bigger children we could dedicate one office full with toys to them. It would be like daycare center on-site.

Women do have startups - they have run businesses for generations.

Women leave technology because of overt and subtle sexism and harassment; http://rachelappel.com/stats-data-and-answers-as-to-why-ther...

And there are plenty that get cut off in the "university" step of your funnel because they aren't equal there either: http://web.mit.edu/fnl/women/women.html#What%20the%20Committ...

That being said, the trend is moving towards women running both the business and the home, solo if need be: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/print/2010/07/the-end-of...

Do those help?

Yes!

Wow, that's fantastic. Did you see the numbers change in the 2011 MIT report[1]? And that LPFI report[2] is just mindblowing.

"The vast majority of men in startups believed their companies spent an adequate amount of time addressing diversity (82%). Almost 40% of women, however, believed not enough time was devoted to addressing company diversity. Additionally, women in startups were much more likely to endorse companywide practices to increase diversity than their male counterparts in startups (65% versus 41%)."

"Female status and underrepresented racial/ethnic status were both significant predictors of negative workplace experiences suggesting that negative workplace experiences increase with membership in both demographic groups (F(1,555)=15.4, p<.00, and F(1,555)=7.47, p<.01; B=.68, SE=.18, p<.01 and B=.73, SE=.29, p<.05; Appendix 2)"

Now that's the way to shoot down a "there's no problem here it's just that women don't want to do startups" argument.

Thanks, I had no idea the numbers were so compelling. I wish there was more of what you're posting on the front page.

[1] http://web.mit.edu/faculty/reports/pdf/women_faculty.pdf

[2] http://www.lpfi.org/sites/default/files/tilted_playing_field...

Here's one more to add to the mix: http://io9.com/5867401/there-really-is-no-difference-between...

> So, when a publication like TechCrunch spews some nonsense about what women want, it means that the next time I go into an interview with a male founder (and they are overwhelmingly male for some reason that I’m not going to address here, but that Penelope assures us has nothing to do with bias) who has read that nonsense, he may be thinking, consciously or subconsciously, “she doesn’t really want to work at this startup because she wants to have a baby.”

I don't think this is true at all. As the original TC article pointed out, the VC community bends over backwards to get as many women as they can working for and speaking about startups. And frankly, regardless of whether someone has told me or whether I believe that "most women want to have babies", when a woman walks into an interview for a startup position, I'm going to assume that she wants that position and probably doesn't want babies. That makes sense since she probably wouldn't be there otherwise.

I agree. It seems a reinforcement rather than a critique of the TechCrunch piece though.

The point abut the Tech Crunch piece was exactly this. Stop saying "we want women to..." and simply stand back and let women do what they want.

I hope that wasn't the point I was making. The point I was trying to make was that telling people that, "most women want x" isn't helpful, regardless of whether it's true right at this moment in history. More to the point, it makes life harder for women who DO want to work at startups (whether or not they want to have babies), because it reinforces the stereotype that we don't want to work full time.

I don't want an investor thinking that's true when I walk into a meeting to ask for money. I don't want a CEO thinking that's true when I'm looking for a job. I don't want them thinking it's true about all women, because it's not true about the woman who matters most to me - ME.

It's about more than letting women do what they want. It's about believing women can do the things they want to do - in this case work at startups. It's about believing that many women do, in fact, want to work at startups and that more will want to work at startups if we talk about how awesome it is. It's about the fact that what we do want changes based on a lot of things that have nothing to do with biology or nature, and that sometimes changing what we want is a really good thing for everybody.

Thanks for reading and commenting. I appreciate the feedback.

I do work in an area where women are extremely underrepresented--- open source software development. By some estimates, 1.5% of open source software developers are women (in contrast nearly 1/3rd of software developers with jobs are women).

I have noticed a few things. The first is that women tend to report being hit on fairly frequently just because the gender ratios are skewed. This isn't the end of the world and workplace/professional society romances and sexual encounters are are not that uncommon so it's going to happen unless we decide sex isn't part of the human condition (which isn't going to work).

The second is that the single most consistent annoyance mentioned to me is everyone asking "how do we get more women involved in open source?" This drives women away.

The third is hard to quantify but my sense is that of the women who come to open source, the vast majority come to it through employment. They have a job, and this is a means to get that job done. You see a lot more men who are independent consultants and hobbyists, and these make up the bulk of most projects. I would say the ratio of hobbyists/consultants of men to women in open source is probably 100:1.

If men get a job in open source it is more often through open source work, in other words participation is usually a career investment while for women it is more often something to do for a job.

There are exceptions of course. And one shouldn't underestimate their importance--- my grandmother was programming computers in Fortran, as she was an astrophysics professor. However at some point I think it is important to realize that asking the question, "how do we get more women involved" misses the point, and in fact drives women away. It's a counterproductive strategy. Simply saying "you are welcome at the table" is IMO a far more helpful way to proceed.

This. "How do we get more women in OSS?" is the same as saying "How do we get more male nurses"? If men want to become nurses, then they will become nurses, if women want to become open source software developers they will become OSS developers.

> If men want to become nurses, then they will become nurses, if women want to become open source software developers they will become OSS developers.

That's true only if there are no institutional or cultural barriers. From reading the experience of women who are interested in OSS or men who are interested in becoming nurses, that does not seem to be the case.

I'd agree with this.

The only exception really is to look at institutional (not cultural) barriers IMO. "Are we doing something that keeps people from being willing to have a seat at the table?"

Cultural barriers are beyond our immediate control where they extend beyond an immediate institution. If nursing is seen as unmanly, then there's not a lot one can do about that. And very often well-meaning attempts to "fix" cultural problems ends up re-inforcing them. Culture is a very resilient, homeostatic thing, and indeed, the idea that "we know what's better for women than they do" is pretty obviously sexist, but it is the same thing that comes up when saying "how do we get more women involved in X."

In general the only culture you can change is that of your own institutions, including your business and your family. That's it.

Edit: Downvotes are a bit amusing. Guess someone finds the idea challenging?

Or fatuous. You've made a lot of sweeping assertions about what can be done about culture with no evidence and no obvious expertise.

You could be right, of course, but a lot of the weaker responses to feminism have the same basic "no point in trying, ladies" conclusion that you do, and turn out to be suspiciously convenient for the speaker. So anybody with much history in this is not going to have time for resistance-is-futile comments whose supporting evidence is, "Gosh, that looks hard to me."

That goes double for startup people. It's par for the course that half of everybody tells you your idea is wrong, unworkable, impossible, foolish, or dangerous, and that you shouldn't even try. You quickly learn not to listen to those people except to see (so rarely, alas) if they have some novel point.

Because you're talking rubbish.

Are you an anthropologist, to be able to say how resilient culture is to change? Can you produce some studies to back up this claim?

How do you explain the anti-slaving and civil rights movements? They didn't take 1000's of years, yet the idea black people were inferior was pretty deeply ingrained in the white culture's psyche.

Saying "we can't change the bad things in our culture" is self-defeating and destructive.

Cultural barriers are beyond our immediate control where they extend beyond an immediate institution. If nursing is seen as unmanly, then there's not a lot one can do about that.

Just because it's not your forte does not mean it cannot be done. There are people who are quite skilled at "hacking" culture. Also, culture is not that homeostatic. One of the things about gradual change is that it goes unnoticed so that people take it for granted that "this is how it has always been" when, in fact, that isn't true. Culture evolves over time. The trick is to help it evolve more in step with the times instead of having a huge lag. It's often the degree of lag-time that creates huge friction and pain.

From my understanding male nurses not only get paid more, but have access to more options/promotions because they are male. So really, it's the opposite of women's experiences in STEM (http://rachelappel.com/stats-data-and-answers-as-to-why-ther...).

Saying "You are welcome at the table" isn't enough. Your actions need to back up those words.

>It's about believing that many women do, in fact, want to work at startups and that more will want to work at startups if we talk about how awesome it is.

This seems to be going against your point that you shouldn't be telling people what women want to do.

The author of the original article was making the point that people advocating that women work in startups (or have other professional careers) makes it hard for women like her, who don't want to do so.

In summary, you say that the other side makes it hard "for women who DO want to work at startups". The other side says you make it hard for women who don't.

Given the gross disparity between the number of women having children and the social acceptability of that act vs the number of women working in startups, we can conclude that one of those two claims of "difficulty" is full of shit.

There is no mass epidemic of women excluded from childbirth due to female targetted promotion of startup culture.

No there isn't, but if you'll notice I included startups as just a part of the overall drive.

I'm not picking a side, but I can tell you from experience that many of the women I know, who happen to be stay at home moms, do feel embarrassed about what they do.

And I do believe it's a result of career advocacy. I'm simply pointing out the hypocrisy, in one side telling the other to stop advocating because it causes difficulty for the former, without acknowledging that the former can use the exact same argument.

I think you are being too generous to the Techcrunch piece.

It wasn't saying "stand back and let women do what they want". It was saying women don't want to run high pressure startups, as their genetics and biological clocks tells them to settle down, have children, and only run little lifestyle business between having children.

(I can dig out exact quotes for that, if anyone wants to to, but don't have time right now)

The problem with this article is that you're basically telling a stupid person to stop saying stupid things because other stupid people will listen to it. Also the post could be shortened to: "please don't make sweeping generalizations because the assumptions they create breeds stereotypes and hurts others' credibility."

I'm not seeing a problem there. TechCrunch is still somehow widely read. Pointing out stupidity there is a public service.

The only problem is that stupid people don't stop being stupid just because you ask them.

I agree with you that it's still important to point out that they're being stupid - if nothing else it lets isolated people know that there are people who don't agree with the stupid ones.

Hmmm... I don't know about that. I've definitely stopped being stupid about some things because people have pointed out my idiocy to me. And I've certainly seen stupid people stop being quite so loudly stupid after feedback. Perhaps even Techcrunch can learn.

We all sometimes say and do stupid things, sometimes without knowing it. We're flawed creatures and that's fine. But there's a point where some people just can't be helped. If a single editorial article in a tech blog will change how an individual thinks towards an entire gender, that person is so stupid that they will probably believe anything (or at least anything that confirms their already existing personal beliefs) and a response like the OP's will do little to help this person become less stupid. But that's just my stupid opinion.

There seems to be an assumption that people (specifically women but same logic applies to men) can either be entrepreneurs or take care of young children, but not both.

I believe that startups can provide the flexible environment that bigger corporations really struggle with. Focus on results not attendence, telecommuting, flexible hours, etc. Maybe some VCs would struggle with the concept, but I know it can work because I've seen it done.

Would you know of resources that help share practical information on how to make that work? Often, simply don't know how and making some sweeping statement that "it can be done" is typically insufficient to help spread the practice.

(I know from first-hand experience as my attempts to tell people "X can be done" often fail to fill them in adequately on the how and this gets me lots of ire. I struggle with that. I am often shocked at what other people do not know that I take for granted they "should" know. I continue to try to work on that.)

Thanks.

There is tons of HR documents that I researched, but in the end I found that the most important way to be genuinely flexible and family-friendly is to listen to your team and then think creatively about finding ways to fit with their needs but also of course be part of a dynamic business. I think its more about attitude and approach than the specific way you do things.

Our business won two awards for our flexible practices and I believe that the reason we were ahead of the competition was that when the judges visited I was able to point to real results not just reams of HR policies and documents.

Founders and early staff really understand that they need to get a lot done and they should also be highly motivated to contribute to the business success. If the business takes the view that it can give people some flexibility in return then this can work out really well.

Some of the people who 'need' the flexibility should be founders or part of the key management team. In a startup you have tremendous control over the way your systems and business practices are set up - think about your family needs when doing this. Allow people to find what works for them. One of my cofounders found that she worked best after your children went to sleep and so we got a huge amount done between 9pm and midnight. We built all our systems so people could work from home and told our team that if their kids were sick they could work from home to look after them. That safety net makes a big difference.

(offtopic) Genuinely wondering: I once said "fuck" in an HN comments and got 10 downvotes. Used some other form of very slight rudeness (often considered humour where I'm from), downvotes again. Assumed it was an American thing, tried to adapt.

Now here's an article full of profanity, and an excellent read also because of that, and nobody complains. Don't get me wrong: I love it. I wish everyone on the internet would get their heart out so well. I'm just surprised HN digs it so much. Anything cultural I'm missing?

Though using curses or any kind of emotional outburst is generally frowned upon intellectually, this is ignored if the person doing the outburst is seen to be fighting bigotry. 'Fuck Node.js' is not an acceptable use of cursing, but 'Fuck Sexism' is.

I strongly agree to the issue at hand where we our patriarchal culture tends to drive women into choosing between career and babies.

I also abhore the fact that our patriarchal culture makes it very very easy for men to have very little participation in taking care of our own children, therefore agravating the issue.

I would suggest that 'maternity-leave' be exchanged for 'family-leave'. Why don't we allow fathers to participate in the care of a newborn baby, or rather, why don't we enforce it.

Not only the care of the child is made a burden on women only, also they have to shoulder the career burden as well.

Maybe then the whole thing would be less of a career problem and turn into a career fact, where it'd just acceptable that anyone employee might at sometime in the future need a leave to care for their respective babies and it would be just normal to do so.

I would suggest that 'maternity-leave' be exchanged for 'family-leave'. Why don't we allow fathers to participate in the care of a newborn baby, or rather, why don't we enforce it.

I believe that this is the case in many places in Northern Europe. From memory, in Sweden parental leave is 6 months and can be divided between the parents as desired. I believe there may also be a minimum for each of them.

Edit: Wikipedia says it's actually 16 months, with 2 months minimum for the "minority" parent, usually the father.

"Twenty percent of women in their 40s do not have children" - http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/13/us/13generations.html?_r=1

I might be old fashioned, but I prefer science and statistics over anecdotes and political correctness.

I don't have the numbers, but I think women wanting to have children is still a pretty likely thing.

More women studying law could also happen for any number of reasons.

This is an appropriate argument basically any time somebody claims that [insert group here] [insert behavior of an individual here]. Groups of people do not behave uniformly; when they behave in statistically significant ways, it is not for uniform reasons.

It's difficult to reason abstractly about groups as they actually are, so we abstract that group into a uniform body - that way we can make abstract claims about their behavior without the benefit of an education in applied statistics and research methodology. It's a useful tool for intuiting behavior, but try to avoid making non-statistical claims about the members of a group of people; you will almost never be correct.

I agree with you but in how many other cases are stats so clear? It's not like we're talking about slight margins of significants. ~80% of women have children and most of them do in what would peak years of career development.

It doesn't explain why the female involvement for CS is so pathetically low compared to other traditionally male careers but I think it explains the values with which many woman are making lifestyle decisions.

<Quote>...who has read that nonsense, he may be thinking, consciously or subconsciously, “she doesn’t really want to work at this startup because she wants to have a baby.” </Quote>

Based on the above quote, looks like the author is more concerned about her interviewers being prejudiced against her(since she is a woman) rather than actually delving into the veracity of Tech Cruch's article!

Stereotypes exist. Women like this. Men like that. Men are more good at that, Women are better at something else etc. As an interviewer if he is prejudiced, its not your fault. I would not think that it is right to control his prejudices by censorship of inconvenient truths!

> Stereotypes exist. Women like this.

The specific problem she is addressing is that when a woman promulgates a stereotype about women, that makes it more believable (and acceptable) to men and, therefore, makes her life worse.

True... are we not taught to NOT judge based on prejudices? There are so many stereotypes not just about women and men that is. There are also stereotypes about Black, Latino, Asian communities etc. Sometimes they are spread by the people of these communities itself. However, its unprofessional or wrong(? for the lack of a better word) on anybody to judge them based on these stereotypes however tempting it might be, and that is what I think our education should teach us? I must admit they do make good late night comedies and hopefully nothing more!

The thing is, though, we think in patterns. Patterns mean prejudices. I.e. This person like this treated me like that. This other person is also like this so he will probably treat me similarly. When you look at how people in oral cultures think (see "Orality and Literacy" by Walter Ong and "Myth and Reality" by Mircea Eliade), it is entirely in this pattern-centric approach. This means I meet you and I assess you based on how you conform to everyone else I have ever met. Maybe that's not the same as judging you, but if it isn't the difference is quite narrow.

I don't think there is an easy way out of this, nor do I think that would be productive. Instead I think the correct approach is to be aware of limitations and simply allow people room to break out of one's pre-conceived assessments (prejudices).

I don't think you can wave away hundreds of thousands of years of human development just because for a few centuries here and there we've had widespread literacy with a largely phonetic writing system (note that excludes Arabic and Hebrew from consideration because of a lack of vowels in how the languages are usually written).

Well, I agree to how you pointed things out but look closer to the article in TC, she says: "People are pretty good at making choices for themselves. Men can stay home. Women can do startups. The thing is, most don’t want to. And that’s okay." And there is the word 'most' in her phrase.

She's expressed her opinion pretty clearly. And believe me, most of the time you, me and all of us runs on generalization. So this is no exception, except you just freaked out because you just didn't fit in this generalization. And frankly, you are just as an exception to that.

Now really, tell me how many of womens really think as you do?

The whole question seems to come from the fact that once there were a number of things women weren't allowed to do and it was deemed a good thing to work on making the playfield equal for both sexes. Turns out, when the gates were opened for one particular activity, many women did indeed want to engage in it and over the decades the gender distribution converged towards 50-50.

However, from that, some people extrapolate that if the gender distribution in some field is too far from 50-50, then there must be something in place that is horrible and sexist and blocking women from that field. Even if technically women can apply and graduate, they conclude that the field still has some implied male chauvinist bias against women. Whenever it gets to that level, it's simply not an option that women might not want it that much.

Other professions took maybe decades before women started to want them, even if they were already allowed to work as such. We can conclude that women today don't want programming badly enough. Those who do are already enrolled or working in the field. They are few in number but merely because they all had no alternative they could themselves live with.

The situation today is that it's not mainstream for women to want to be programmers. It's not wrong, people just aren't sure yet.

This is a very different statement that women aren't explicitly or implicitly allowed to become programmers in the contemporary society. Barring a few ploughers, people often don't know what they can want unless they see a supporting example many enough times. If you're a young woman and you don't know what you want to do, you could become a nurse. Many nurses started like that, regardless of whether they actually like their job or not.

It might be a few decades forward when enough women get into programming, that the field also begins to appeal to women. It may also never happen, or it might happen to an extent. Maybe roughly 1% of women would like to do programming where as roughly 2% of men want to do it. If so, then eventually roughly one programmer out of three will be women some day, in the average.

Thanks for the article writer to voice a loud counterexample that hopefully reset people into confusion about the true state of matters.

It's thinking like yours that makes it harder to get into fields where women are "under" represented.

I battled sexual harassment and derogatory comments about my ability to work in tech (specifically about being female) to stay in the industry.

If I'd have bowed out years ago, it wouldn't have been because I "don't want programming badly enough" - it was because I had better things to do than prove my vagina makes absolutely no difference to my ability to code.

Just because the writer or a few women decided to do a startup or decided not to have children doesn't mean that most women are doing the same thing.

I'm not a fan of tech crunch but their article was more of a general fact based on statistics and biology/nature, it should not be taken as an insult, starting a blog post with STFU won't make your point any more valid.

I heard people telling women to have babies and quit learning (let alone starting their own companies) more than what Penelope has portrayed. Matter of fact, NO ONE has ever told me to join a startup or start one. This is not a first time Ms. Trunk has lectured us about what women think and want. Please, you don't present every female and all this talk should stop. Just do your job or whatever you want.

If everyone STFU about what others want or don't want and just focus more on they want out of their lives, world would be a far better place.

Would the world have been a better place if the civil rights movement didn't have support from non-blacks?

Positive change requires social awareness and participation in that change, not just from the disenfranchised.

Good read that pretty much matches my thoughts on this issue. Thanks.

maybe it's just me but I can't see how either the original article nor the response is in any way significant. If I want to work in a startup wearing heels, then I'll do that. I don't need TC's permission for that. And, being in a startup, neither will I have the time to get upset about someone's opinion.

I think the same way. If I want to do X and someone says "You shouldn't do that" or "that's weird" or "you don't have the skills" or whatever, I usually reply with a "OK", then go and do what I want to do.

I certainly don't waste my energy trying to make sure that everyone else agrees with my choices in life.

Favorite Line: "I want to wear heals, and write jQuery, sometimes at the same time."

no one says ALL women. but MOST women DO want to dedicate time to families. just like many good drivers suffer high insurance premiums because of statistical truths about gender, age, car color, # of doors, etc. how about custody of children during divorce? there are many biases that also favor women because of statistics.

we all have to deal with unfairness every day because we don't fit some stereotype. that's life, it's not fair.

What if I never Opened TFU?

Almost all discussions involving women with respect to stereotypes or gender oppression will devolve into the same pedantic, non-productive patterns of fuzzy thinking and inability to discern causation from correlation. It's a topic where cherry-picked beliefs are so strong (on multiple sides) that it pulls you in like a black hole, and nothing truly useful, not even light, can escape. Just noise. I've learned to try to ignore it when I can. Especially here on HN, where the "college" demographic is particularly strong, and particularly susceptible to it.

The takeaway I wish everyone would have, instead, would be something like, in short: that women and men are actually different. Get over it. Individuals vary. No shit! Unfair things happen. Get over it. Men get shit too. Not all things you don't like are because of your gender. Get over it. And there are plenty worse things, by orders of magnitude. Get over it.

People (still) want to discuss complex issues that effect their career and everyday life. Get over it.

I'm getting a bit tired of this fake modern-thinking. I don't think anyone is disregarding women right to self determination by making an observation that is obvious.

There are jobs and social roles that are clearly perused mostly by men and some mostly by women. That's because man and women are different. There's nothing wrong with that, do we need to pretend that men and women are equal to grant equal rights to both?

So this woman is an exception, minority if you prefer, but so what? I feel that is rather frustrating that people doesn't accept simple facts because they are not fashionable in today's ethics or are not politically correct.

Everytime someone touches a sensitive subject concerning a group, there comes the sh*tstorm "you're stupid, I am the proof of the contrary". This is particularly sad among circles were one would expect to hear opinions of wise people. I guess even wise people have a hard time getting rid of taboos.

It's not clear that some roles are genuinely best filled by women, and some by men. There is still plenty of institutional sexism that pushes people into certain roles. For example, many women in high-powered careers are forced out after they have children. Here is a link to a book on the subject: http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/18616558/ns/today-books/t/why-...

Here is an excerpt: "Married to fellow professionals, who face the same pressures at work that they do, women are home alone and go home because they have been unsuccessful in their efforts to obtain flexibility or, for those who were able to, because they found themselves marginalized and stigmatized, negatively reinforced for trying to hold on their careers after becoming mothers."

You can't look at the general pattern of women failing to pursue their own startups and assume that this is because they actually chose to do so. You might as well step back in time and assume that the reason black people were picking cotton instead of determining their own fates is because they were biologically inferior. Culture matters.

For me it is crystal clear. I have no problem stating that because I am not disrespecting nor discriminating anyone based on gender. What you mean by "it's not clear" is "there's no scientific proof", which is a totally different thing. You may argue that it's just something I believe in, but I'm ok everyone else's skepticism, I don't want to convince anybody of anything, but heck, don't disregard my opinion because of your taboos. Either way, even it wouldn't be clear, it wouldn't be clear that I'm wrong either.

I agree with you that culture matters, and indeed people have been victim of discrimination countless times throughout mankind history. But you are afraid to admit that other aspects might matter too, because it touches your taboos.

You pick the example of black people being thrown to the bottom of the social structure of north american society because you know that arguing with that is unethical by pretty much any current standard. But just recently James Watson stated precisely that the average black person is less intelligent than the average white. Now, quite frankly, I don't care about that subject, but would dare to discuss it or would you just claim that discussion is out of your ethical boundaries? It's not a nice topic to discuss, but because of that you can't just pretend there's nothing to discuss.

I'm just saying: If your arguments are limited by taboos then your opinion can't be of much value.

If any of this is "crystal clear", then you need to revisit your username choice.

It's fine to form an opinion based on limited and partial data; you have to. But the strength of your opinion should be based on how much data you have to support it, and you should revisit it when someone presents you with data that contradicts it (as the grandparent post attempted to do).

I'm not sure what to make of your "average black person is less intelligent" point. Are you seriously arguing that a debatable genetic difference was the principle reason antebellum blacks were picking cotton?

You can, and most people could discuss it, but it's an extremely weak point. (E.g., individual != average, and in-population range is very large, so you'd expect to see the appropriate percentage of black landowners, successful business owners, etc.). Hmm.

On the subject of skepticism -- it's perhaps worth mentioning that James Watson is an accomplished scientist, but he's not considered an expert on the study & measures of human intelligence any more than you are. Arguments from authority should at least offer an authority in that field, not just from any field.

If any of this is "crystal clear", then you need to revisit your username choice.

Well observed, but no. What makes me skeptical about many things is having a clear opinion/view about other things. For me that's the true essence of skepticism.

I didn't make any such point. And no, I'm not arguing that. But the phrasing of your question does prove my point about how afraid people is about some debates. That is particularly ironic because they seem to be so certain about it, why should they be afraid to debate it?

You can, and most people could discuss it, but it's an extremely weak point.

I don't think you really mean it, sorry.

(E.g., individual != average, and in-population range is very large, so you'd expect to see the appropriate percentage of black landowners, successful business owners, etc.). Hmm.

Yep, I really don't think you mean it. Starting by the 'individual != average' is a common symptom of such taboos. By doing so you try to nullify any consideration about a group of people, but you go on and do just that to prove your point whenever necessary. For the record, I share the same opinion as you about the topic.

I might be wrong here, of course, but I'm getting the feeling that you are assuming I'm 'white' and that that is strongly affecting your reasoning. You might stop to re-think for a little while. Just saying.

I had a vague idea you were Indian, but no strong sense, FWIW. I also can't imagine how it would affect what I wrote. These are not new topics I'm only considering now.

I didn't know what to make of this point:

"You pick the example of black people being thrown to the bottom of the social structure of north american society [example in the post you're responding to was more blacks picking cotton historically in the US] because you know that arguing with that is unethical by pretty much any current standard. But just recently James Watson stated precisely that the average black person is less intelligent than the average white."

Can you clarify your point, then? Or less tangentially, return to your original points about the topic at hand, and present research that's too taboo to discuss?

If you claim your opinion is too taboo to discuss, that's pretty much just blowing smoke; people who disagree (and explain why) aren't shying away from a taboo; they're disagreeing. If you have "inconvenient truths" that seem to contradict common opinions, that's far more interesting (and yes, is worth discussing), though if you don't entertain the possibility that you're misinterpreting the data (because you're already crystal clear...), it's all a waste of breath.

I tell what you could do of that point. You could admit that you deliberately picked a sensitive topic (black people being oppressed in the past) as a counterexample to push the discussion in a dead end because race is a 'dangerous' topic for anyone to touch. I do not want to discuss such topic here because it will inevitably take over the original one as it always do.

I don't have inconvenient trues, only an inconvenient opinion, and that is: women and men won't reach a 50/50 share in many roles of society simply because women and men are significantly different both physically and psychologically. Furthermore, I think the trend of forcing men and women to be equal in all aspects doesn't help improve women rights, but rather degrades them.

Many ask for scientific proof. I don't have such thing, but if you understand what 'scientific proof' really means you'll agree that is not much more than a consensus on a matter that will prevail until we find a better explanation for it, a better 'scientific proof' that will render the previous one obsolete.

But on to the subject, from the age of ten if you look at people's performances in school, it's pretty much obvious that girls do consistently better across the board. On the other hand if you pick the top students of a specific subject you'll find many more boys than girls, specially in exact sciences and the like. I've live in a few european countries and this pattern is pretty obvious. Honestly I can't find an active social setup that would enforce this outcome. Sure there might be some residual gender segregation that still affects it, but in my opinion this pattern is too consistent to be solely explained by social constraints. Specially since it's observed since very young age. This is an example, one of the simplest, but there are more evidence.

Do you think that this is not relevant? Why?

Don't get jtheory confused with me. I deliberately brought in race because opinions on race are shaped by culture, not because I felt like ending things in a flamewar. Opinions on race and gender are the kinds of things that are shaped by where you are in history. That is, they are shaped by the culture you grew up in. The main I'm not a racist asshole right now is because I wasn't raised to be. The main reason I don't take studies that show women and minorities are stupider than white men for granted, honestly, is because I've been raised to be extremely skeptical of those studies. I am honest about why I believe what I do, and I am terrified of the cultural biases that I'm not aware of. I wanted to make a point that beliefs on what a group of people are or are not capable of are highly dependent on culture, and the time period you find yourself in. You're going to have to work extra hard to convince me that you are actually aware of your cultural biases and that you came to you conclusions about gender through a completely honest inquiry, and right now, you're failing really hard.

Anyway, there are plenty of cultural explanations for female underperformance:

1. Stereotype threat. People who are stereotyped negatively in one arena of life will do worse when reminded of that stereotype. I recommend reading Whistling Vivaldi, by Claude Steele. You can force white American men to underperform in sporting tasks if you remind them that white men are stereotyped as being less athletic than black men. This effect is, of course, extremely detrimental to women who are studying math and science or conducting business at a very high level. The extra stress of not wanting to live up to a negative stereotype has the ironic effect of causing underperformance. 2. Sexism is still strongly present in many countries. See this study, for example, that societies with greater equality have more even gender balance in representatives to the International Math Olympiad. http://www.pnas.org/content/106/22/8801.abstract

You seem to try to debunk some [imaginary] point about women being somehow 'inferior'. I never said such thing. Women and men are different, that's all I said. I even started by stating that girls outperform boys in school to a very large extent. Boys appear to have their advantage among the tiny narrow peak only, that affects a tiny minority of people.

I've lived in societies that took radically different approaches on this. Whenever I talk about this I'm called 'fascist' or 'marxist' depending where I am. I think that's hilarious to say the least.

Mmm... I don't want to sound arrogant, but have you red the source you linked beyond the abstract? If you follow the links, one of them will take you here: http://pps.sagepub.com/content/6/2/134.full

and that clearly states that opinions like mine cannot be disregarded, it even acknowledges that such possibilities are less studied.

But there's one important thing to note. If you're a biologist and write a paper where you go through an hypothesis similar to my views, you can still expect an avalanche of cheap offenses.

The link of this thread is called "STFU about what women want". Why is the author so pissed of? Why resourcing to such heavy language right on the title? Sorry, but if you have a clear solid opinion you don't reply an inoffensive opinion with 'STFU'. If you do so it's because of some other reason. I'd say taboo, or at least she has no strong valid point so she resources to a violent response.

The authors of the study are good scientists for being open to other possibilities. I salute them for that. But where it comes to what women can and cannot do, there seems to be a great deal of compelling evidence that cultural factors are immensely important, and any statements on whether one gender is really better at running a startup than another is probably premature. The study itself is in favor of cultural factors, rather than ability, playing the larger role in where women end up in life.

The point is, intelligent people at the time thought that it was biologically predetermined that some men should enslave others. For a more recent, horrific example, it used to be legal to sterilize people without their permission if they failed an IQ test. A Supreme Court justice, Oliver Wendell Holmes, endorsed this.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics_Board_of_North_Carolin...

It is entirely possible to be an intelligent person too blinded by the social norms of the time to give people the benefit of the doubt, the justice, and the mercy that they deserve. And a true skeptic ought to recognize that, and be afraid of embracing any belief that feels natural or true.

You are not a good skeptic if you are willing to consider beliefs that are bizarre or taboo. Religious fundamentalists do the same thing, too. You are a good skeptic if you're willing to question your own intuitions.

The examples you pick and the way you present them are very relevant. your observations are also very well made and in my opinion very reasonable. In fact i agree with you. I just think your conclusion is undermined by your unwillingness to question yourself, even if you state that everybody should do just that.

To pick up on your example, castration. I recently red about swedish history and found out that some decades ago the Swedish government forced castration on a rather high amount of people through criminal law. Sure, the reason was supposedly not the same as in North Carolina, but if 1 to 3 percent of the population got the penalty, one may ask if the criteria were really all that well defined and legit. Personally, I also consider this horrific. The truth is, the developed and tolerant swedish society we all know basically started after the castration trend. I will not say it's a consequence of it, I sincerely hope it's not. But will I disregard that possibility just because I don't like it? No, never. I dare to look at those facts and try to understand them. I don't like that possibility, it is brutal, but I will not censor my critical thinking.

We have gender distinction in sports because it's obvious that men and women are physically different. No one objects that. But no one dares to admit the possibility of man being different than women intellectually/psychologically/mentally, because that's a taboo. It's not obvious, there is no scientific evidence, etc. but why does everybody gets so angry if that possibility is even talked about? I'm tired of this fake morals. You are not more respectful towards woman rights simply by staying away from sensitive topics. Most importantly, I don't mind if you think I respect women rights less than you because of my opinions. I know I how much I respect women rights, I could care less about proving it.

The author makes the very good point that what people "want" changes over time. For example, in the 1960s only a small fraction of a given law school class was female.

Now almost 50% of law school graduates in a given year are female.

And I am sure people in 1965 were saying the same things about the differences between men and women and how those differences were reflected in law school classes.

The author's very valid concern is that one cannot draw the conclusions Penelope Trunk is drawing. The evidence just isn't in and quite frankly never will be in because society changes, expectations change, and preferences change.

I don't know how many startups will be founded by women 40 years from now. Neither do you. Which is exactly why the the author is writing "STFU about what women want." When we make assertions about what other people want we end up categorizing them without sufficient evidence, which ultimately leads to poor decision-making.

Making an observation isn't in itself problematic. It's all the bullshit that people tack on after that. To wit:

There are jobs and social roles that are clearly perused mostly by men and some mostly by women. That's because man and women are different.

This is either tautological or fatuous. You've gone from a simple observation (in 2011, some jobs are held at different rates by men and women) and suggested that it's somehow a natural feature of the universe, like the gravitational constant. There are a lot of possible explanations for the different occupational frequencies, and you seized on one of them with no proof and no apparent thought about alternatives.

200 years ago, women (and, say, black people) weren't doctors. People argued then, as you do now, that the current situation was just the outcome of natural differences. They said that not because it was true (it wasn't) or because they had any real evidence (they didn't). They said it because it was convenient for them to believe that.

I just made a simple observation yes. Whatever reason we find will fallback to men being different than women. That is in fact the only think we can say for sure. The outcome might not be fair, but it's not by denying this fact that we will make things better.

As for you example, it's flawed. 200 years ago doctors played a very different role in society of those of today's doctors. If you look carefully at today's society and try to find a social role more like that of a 1800's doctor, you'll probably find a job that is still done mostly by men. Is it fair? Indeed no. But it is in fact a good example how we can improve women rights by going to the root of the problem without fear of being political incorrect. I might not have any evidence, but nor have you.

I am sorry. There were few women doctors in the UK because prior to the 1972 Sex Equality Act the Medical Schools had quotas of between 5% and 15% for female students.

When that barrier went the number of female doctors took off like a rocket.

Likewise with the black middle class in the US - once the quota's that kept African Americans out of Universities ended, lo! magic!

"Today… increasing numbers of doctors — mostly women — decide to work part time or leave the profession. Since 2005 the part-time physician workforce has expanded by 62 percent, according to recent survey data from the American Medical Group Association, with nearly 4 in 10 female doctors between the ages of 35 and 44 reporting in 2010 that they worked part time.

This may seem like a personal decision, but it has serious consequences for patients and the public.

Medical education is supported by federal and state tax money both at the university level — student tuition doesn’t come close to covering the schools’ costs — and at the teaching hospitals where residents are trained. So if doctors aren’t making full use of their training, taxpayers are losing their investment. With a growing shortage of doctors in America, we can no longer afford to continue training doctors who don’t spend their careers in the full-time practice of medicine."

http://parenting.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/13/should-women-b...

That people in the past argued that something was due to natural differences doesn't necessarily mean that natural differences don't exist, and that they had no evidence then doesn't mean that we have none now. Men and women differ genetically by about the same amount that humans and chimpanzees do, so to discount the possibility that there just might be some real differences in the way we are prone to behave is just as ridiculous as to suggest that those genes account for the entire difference.

There are very solid biological reasons to believe that men should always be more genetically inclined to seek out reproductive risk than women (male reproductive success is more variable than female success by a good margin). It's not a very big stretch from there to conjecture that perhaps nature achieved that by cranking up the overall risk tolerance knob in men, since that would probably require fewer bit-flips than hard coding a condition for reproductive risk - in fact, to a large extent, we know that testosterone does exactly what this would require. That would explain a lot about why men are more likely than women to go in for high-risk high-reward ventures like startups...

I'm not saying that social factors are not in play, too, but quite frankly, these social factors are far less oppressive than they were 50 years ago, yet we've seen relatively little progress in terms of gender ratios. This makes me suspect that there are probably some other causes in effect, and the genetic one is an obvious suspect that I don't think has been properly debunked, excepting attempts to do so by overreaching appeals to equality that are, IMO, not justified by the relevant biology.

I have never suggested natural differences don't exist.

I'm suggesting that a) using the idea of them without evidence to justify apparently unfair outcomes is bullshit, b) historically people making those arguments have often been spectacularly wrong, and c) people who make that argument when it's personally convenient are perhaps fooling themselves.

You're also rampantly committing the naturalistic fallacy. What's natural tells us nothing about what's right. Even if we have made a perfectly fair society (which we certainly haven't) and discover that there is some difference in outcomes that is explainable by genetic differences, that doesn't mean we should accept the result.

If some people are genetically likely to be less good at math, should we cancel their math classes? Or should we give them better ones? I say the latter: as a society we want people to understand and appreciate math.

If some group of people is more prone to a disease, do we go with what's natural? Or do we work against it? Consider heart disease for African Americans, or skin cancer for white people. As one of the naturally pale, I appreciate having sunblock available, and cultural reminders to put it on or cover up. And if I do get skin cancer, I'd rather be treated instead of being told it's "natural" for me to die of it.

I've also heard it argued that psychopaths make "natural" CEOs, and that we should therefore accept their various depredations. That ignores that CEO isn't some sort of ecological niche; it's an artificial, societally-constructed position. We may have reason to want CEOs to be more responsible than average rather than less, no matter what's "natural" in this context. And we may have reason to want startups being created by a broader collection of people than those who might "naturally" most incline (after a lifetime of unnatural conditioning) to play the entirely artificial game we've set up for them.

This is what's frustrating about these conversations, the worst is always assumed. Given that I absolutely do not believe that "natural" implies "right", I'm annoyed at the accusation, which comes up with some regularity even though I (like most others in the "not-only-nurture" camp) specifically disclaim such a view and never said a single thing about what is right or not.

First, let me be clear: I think that the evidence that women are genetically worse at math is shoddy, at best. I think the evidence that their performance is less variable is very robust, but that's a very different claim.

Second, if either one is provably the case, then no, I very strongly don't think we should just throw our hands up. I think we should try to look at what causes the difference in statistical distribution of talent and figure out how to exploit/correct it - it's evolutionarily inconceivable that math talent is directly hard-coded genetically, so it's got to be emerging as a second or third order effect of genes, perhaps related to stress response (learning math is a process of experiencing micro-stresses over and over, and dealing with them in a way that makes you learn rather than get frustrated or angry - the "mathy" emotional state is a very delicate balance, even in people that are good at math). This is true even if the male/female gap is not genetic, since it's pretty clear that there is some sort of heritable component to math ability. Figuring out how this sort of thing affects performance could be very helpful, because even though it's partially innate (and somewhat based on brain chemistry), it can often be directly trained.

But if we declare by fiat that performance in math is primarily guided by factors outside the student's head (which is implicit in the "sexism keeps girls out of field X" argument), then we'll never figure out what's really going on, and we'll never discover how to help people that aren't predisposed to be good at math get better.

I general I agree with this line of thinking. We should encourage women to take on careers and challenges where they are under represented. We shouldn't create sexist work environments and educational institutions that discourage participation from the opposite sex.

I don't think this is a clear cut issue though. Sexism exists in some place, but so does enjoyment by men or women for certain careers. I think part of that enjoyment is created by a culture that tells men and women to be certain ways but I think also some of it has to do with genetics - i.e. historically women were the primary child-rearers so they tend to be more of the nurturers.

There is also the question of how much energy does society as a whole invest in correcting sexist historical imbalances? Do we just say, "everyone can be anything they want when they grow up!" and leave it at that? Or do we impose things like quotas and programs specifically targeted to encourage women to join professions they're under represented?

I have mostly questions and no answers :(

> I'm getting a bit tired of this fake modern-thinking.

I'm getting really tired of the old stratagem consisting of pretending that social norms are a natural given. Because you know, this old beast have been beaten to death for centuries, time to move on.

Recipe for success:

> There are jobs and social roles that are clearly perused mostly by black and some mostly by white people. That's because black and white are different.

I know, it's quite obvious that men and women are different. But does it count nowadays? Sure, a man is more fit than a woman to push the plough behind a horse, or cart around stones in a wheelbarrow. However these activities are of no relevance in our modern world.

Similarly we could argue that black people are less at risk of skin cancer by exposure to sunlight, and therefore are better fit for street work. See what I mean? It would be so nice of you to reconsider your position to the light of the last 50 years of anthropology and social sciences.

I thought the point of the original TC article was that we should stop pandering to women and it's jus a fact of life that a majority don't want to do startups. That's fine and it's not knocking women. I can see how the thing about babies could have confused people into missing that point though.

I really think you don't see many women doing it because there aren't a whole lot trying to. When you've got an applicant pool that's already a minority and you know that a good portion of any applicant pool won't get a particular job then it's not at all surprising to see that not many women get into startups. If there aren't many trying to start and a good portion won't make it to the finish line then this isn't surprising. I think it's more wrong to try to find minority candidates for the sake of finding minority candidates. Let the cream rise and if it doesn't consist of minorities then it's not our fault.

Umad? Stop whining and go make something.

The writer of this article haven't read, or understood, the article it's arguing against...

"I'll be a wife and mother first, then First Lady". Jackie Kennedy

Class, pure class.

Class, pure class.

And increasingly, limited to the upper class.

If you read her whole life story, it's not all "class". She is remembered as nothing but wife to someone else, and another rich someone else.

It does not matter what women want if the government is going to helpfully step in and make it impossible to function. Consider the federal law in regards to descrimination of women:

[i]Sex Discrimination

Title VII's broad prohibitions against sex discrimination specifically cover:

    Sexual Harassment - This includes practices ranging from direct requests for sexual favors to workplace conditions that create a hostile environment for persons of either gender, including same sex harassment. (The "hostile environment" standard also applies to harassment on the bases of race, color, national origin, religion, age, and disability.)
    Pregnancy Based Discrimination - Pregnancy, childbirth, and related medical conditions must be treated in the same way as other temporary illnesses or conditions.[/i]

Ok so you can't as an employer treat your [women] employees having babies as a life-changing [and work-productivity reducing] event? WTF that might work at wal-mart or a retail-bank or even possibly a law firm, but that will not work at a startup where you have to give it 100% for >8hrs/day. What will actually happen is that the woman will be passed over for a man who has none of the associated liabilities. Then the VCs and unhappy bloggers will be scratching their heads as to why there are so few women in startups. Some of those VCs will also seek out women founders in some sort of PC guilt trip. http://www.eeoc.gov/facts/qanda.html

What needs to happen to fix this and ensure equality for women who do not want children is to get rid of the workplace discrimination laws regarding women. Then you can have a woman sign a contract that she will not have babies for x amount of time. Otherwise we will just have the current under-the-radar discrimination.

Or you could sue the startups? Also have maternity leave for mothers and fathers like in other countries?

While I'd love to look at the world with rosy colored glasses I think this is simply unrealistic. While the parent post wasn't worded all that well (sorry). Its just a fact that it isn't realistic to expect a startup or even an early stage company to go without a critical member for several months, regardless of the cause of the absence. Male, Female, Trans-gender, pregnancy, bar fight, rehab, base jumping, whatever. The cause doesn't really matter, the effect is extremely destructive to the company and I feel it's reasonable to expect those in critical positions to protect themselves against such absences. Just to be clear, not singling out women here, there are many things everyone can do to avoid issues that could result in such an absence.

I find it ironic that you would say this about a type of business that is usually praised for it's ability to be flexible with work hours, granted that the employees finish what they are expected to finish.

This obviously varies with position to position, but flexibility shouldn't be thrown out of a window because it might be an inconvenience. It's important to treat your employees well!

There is a large difference between flexible work and under going a life changing event during the development of the business.

Given a situation where you were picking between two individuals for a co-founder or other critical role, equally qualified, one telling you they are free and clear, no outstanding obligations for the foreseeable future and the other saying "well, there is a good chance I'll be heavily engaged in an outside issue for a couple months next summer", which would you choose? Disregard all gender / cause for the issue.

Also I have met men who have been willing to shift paternity time off for a few weeks to accommodate business schedules. Obviously that's not possible for women.

I totally agree, picking someone as a cofounder that will be taking leave for their newborn baby is insane, but I had 'lower' positions in mind when I was talking about flexibility.

1. Risk is a normal part of doing business, especially more so for a startup, and it is logical for a business owner to want to reduce risk. As you say, there are many sources of risks to employees that have a direct effect on the business.

2. The division in this discussion seems to stem around how best to manage the risk of project impact caused by losing a critical team member owing to pregnancy event.

3. Extreme positions:

a. The risk to the business is little different from any other unplanned risk that the business needs to deal with anyway, and to assume otherwise is to be sexist; i.e. there may be women out there for whom pregnancy does not impact their work any more than an illness, and assuming that all women are equally likely to fall pregnant and handle pregnancy in the same way is discriminatory.

b. An ethical/strategic position whereby the additional risk is accepted because the benefits gained in terms of equity makes the risk acceptable.

c. Pregnancy is a flat-out optional potential risk to the business and since a business owner wants to reduce risk then it's logical to avoid employing women.

4. IMO this is all a matter of opinion and has everything to do with one's appetite for risk, one's risk exposure (capital & risk management) and one's principles. The same person given two different startups could come to different conclusions depending on these variables, for instance.

Given this, I really don't see the point of this discussion as it is pretty much subjective and depends entirely on the startup in question and the owners invested therein.

> Ok so you can't as an employer treat your [women] employees having babies as a life-changing [and work-productivity reducing] event

Read the next section after the part you quoted - since the passage of the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993, those prohibitions (against pregnancy based discrimination) apply to both men and women.

Sure, but still...

One thing we have to face here is that having kids is different for men and women. Women often want to take more time off after having babies, scale back on work, etc. Men usually don't. Maybe we should treat this as something to be supported instead of a problem to be solved? Maybe women who want to do these things should be encouraged to do what they want (or not do them if they don't want).

But for many women, having kids is a much more life-changing experience than it is for most men.

> Women often want to take more time off after having babies, scale back on work, etc. Men usually don't.

Is there data or research to support this statement that women want to take more time off and (by implication) men don't want to (or want to less)?

I don't have kids, but looking among my friends, both the mothers and fathers want to spend as much time as possible with their kids. While the fathers often went back to work before the mothers, it wasn't because they wanted to, it was more about the cultural pressure for them to be the bread winners and not about them "wanting" to care for their kids less than the mothers.

I don't have hard data. All I know is that I have known more than one women who quit her job after being told she couldn't take a year off following childbirth and never known a man to do the same. I have also known far more women to take unpaid timeoff than men, and to cut back on work following having kids.

Interestingly the data presented in the TC article is stuff that's been true for over ten years: unmarried women without kids earn more than similarly experienced unmarried men without kids. This then reverses particularly after a married woman has kids.

edit: I can't respond to your response, so I'll post it here

> have known more than one women who quit her job after being told she couldn't take a year off following childbirth and never known a man to do the same. I have also known far more women to take unpaid timeoff than men, and to cut back on work following having kids.

Sure, I know plenty of women who have done the same, but it's never been that they wanted to do so more than men, it's that the cultural expectations ("father has to be the breadwinner") meant that the fathers felt they had to keep working, while it's more cultural acceptable for the women to stay home. IOW, all of the young fathers I know would gladly quit their jobs and stay at home if money wasn't a problem (and in the case of one friend who's wife is a surgeon, that's exactly what he did).

I think one has to wait for a while before replying at that depth. Obviously it is impossible to adequately measure subjective things like how badly someone wants something except as a function of what that individual is willing to give up to get it. Women are more likely to sacrifice career for spending time with infant children, so we can conclude that they prefer as a group on average the latter more than the former, at least when compared with men. I don't know of a better epistemological way to measure this.

I think you have a fairly complicated set of balancing acts that happen in corporate America which make this necessary. The big one is that maternity/paternity leave has to be as short as possible to reduce disruption to the business, and it has to be fair so the same policies have to apply to men as to women (otherwise you have a big discrimination mess on your hands, bigger than we have now).

So what this means in effect is that the system demands that one parent makes a sacrifice. As we all know how financially strapped middle-income families are (esp. after the rise of the two income family, see Elizabeth Warren's excellent book "The Two Income Trap"), this means one has to go back to work soon. For biological reasons,* this fundamentally favors the man (who will then be favored when it comes time to assess promotions).

* When I worked at Microsoft, you got 1 month paid leave and up to two months unpaid. One month is probably not enough to get really adjusted to life as a new parent, especially for the mother who is going through hormonal changes as well as sleep cycle changes, may be breastfeeding, etc. So after that, the dad goes back to work and the mom stays home for at least a few more weeks.

However, even this cannot explain the willingness to quit so one can take a year or two off work. That's separate.

> Women often want to take more time off after having babies, scale back on work, etc. Men usually don't.

I'm going to shoot proper discussion methods in the heart and counter your unsupported claim with an anecdote: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/10/world/europe/10iht-sweden....

> Women often want to take more time off after having babies, scale back on work, etc

And when they do, you can make objective evaluations of their performance, not pay them for days they don't work, etc.

If your employees are working reasonable hours, and you're applying leave and vacation policies uniformly, you'll get in no legal trouble. If not, your company has problems beyond sexism.

So...

By that matter requiring that all employees (male/female) only take no more than 2 months off after having a child, and that all vacations occur in regemented times, and that if you can make it through this for say 15 years, you get added benefits is not sexist right?

At some point one thinks of the quote by Anatole France, "The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich and the poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread."

I'm honestly not sure what any of that means. I'm guessing you misunderstand "uniform application of policy" to mean "rigid application of a rigid policy", but with the way you've written, I can't even be sure of that.

I am saying that there is a difference between what's a facially non-discriminatory policy that clearly discriminates and what's a truly non-discriminatory policy.

BTW, from discussions I have had with young women trying to decide whether to go down the tenure track in academia in the sciences, I would say that academia has a system which is very discriminatory in its effects.

> Ok so you can't as an employer treat your [women] employees having babies as a life-changing [and work-productivity reducing] event?

No, you have to actually evaluate their performance, instead of making assumptions about it based on family status. Try evaluating things and making decisions objectively, instead of with your personal prejudices.

I fail to understand how the absence of work for a few months is a prejudice. I mean, if a company needs to hire a person for a certain critical role in the next months, how is a person that cannot work during that period of time going to do the job? Honestly, that's just pathetic. If anything there should be laws to protect women's jobs in pregnancy situations. Pretending that it's a non issue will only make room for discrimination under the radar.

> I mean, if a company needs to hire a person for a certain critical role in the next months, how is a person that cannot work during that period of time going to do the job?

I think you're making unwarranted assumptions. Specifically, you haven't read the family leave statutes. Employers don't really have any obligations under them until an employee has worked for a year, and small employers are generally exempt.

well, that depends on where you live.

Honestly, I thought that everyone was replaceable in today's world...

Sigh. Another useless fucking article is #1 after 1 hour. It is the same tired discussion repeated ad nausea.

This is actually necessary because of the first nauseating article. If you correctly remember, another Techcrunch post also made the round before jwz set the record straight.

Okay, now all we need is a "STFU women" post and we'll be back to regular HN interesting stuff :D

Durr hurr yeah cuz women complain all the time about stupid shit amirite fellas?

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