I was asked to leave an event for female founders because I had my baby with me | Hacker News Reader

I was asked to leave an event for female founders because I had my baby with me

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98 pointsavs733168 comments

> Darwin was in a stroller, and I was rocking him back and forth to sleep. When he started babbling and cooing, I moved to the back of the room. That's when someone approached me and said, "Would you like to stroll your baby outside? I want people to get the full experience out of this conference."

I am a dad who brings kids everywhere. This is an entirely polite and reasonable response. If my kids are being distracting, I appreciate being told and have zero problem taking a baby out to calm down. They never said she had to leave because she had a baby.

It's great when others are chill around your kids, but I would never just force random people to have to put up with children.

Contextualize the event, though. Womanhood and motherhood are often quite strongly connected. An event celebrating and developing women should anticipate a higher percentage of the audience will be mothers with infants.

Be prepared for that, communicate with your audience in advance, have clear expectations with staff, perhaps be more permissive with infants, etc.

The context matters here.

> Womanhood and motherhood are often quite strongly connected

Was there on-site childcare?

"The context matters here."

It shouldn't. I have two young kids. My youngest has started making loud noises/talking during events like this and I immediately headed for the door with her. It's completely inconsiderate to the other people in the room.

Read the rest of my post again. It's not just the parent I'm discussing.

STFU

>They never said she had to leave because she had a baby.

"To me, that's ridiculous. [for one of the partners of Y Combinator to] ask me to leave [("do you want to take your baby outside")] with a quietly cooing baby during a talk that was explicitly about the challenges of being a mother and founder was shocking. I realized then that the monster of systemic barriers to entrepreneurs who are also moms is bigger than I ever realized." - FTA

Imagine a medical conference about new treatments for allergies. Now imagine if one of the attendees had a never ending sneezing/coughing fit. Would it not be reasonable to ask that person to step outside to avoid distraction? I don't think the topic of the talk means related distractions should be ignored.

"Imagine a hypothetical and quite silly scenario, which I've constructed to be obviously absurd" isn't a great rhetorical device.

There's no need for analogizing here, we have a clear scenario we can discuss directly - a woman was asked to leave an event discussing motherhood because her baby was deemed a distraction.

We are plenty capable of just discussing that without made up scenarios.

Analogies are often useful to remove the emotional charge of a discussion (like those related to parenting) to try and pin down more rational principles.

Yes, they are often useful for that. Not in this case.

This reads as a shallow dismissal. If your goal is to arrive at first principles, I disagree. As others have said, it's difficult for many to have a discussion about parenting because it's so central to many people's identity that it becomes emotionally charged. It's much more difficult to ascertain core principles amid emotional reactions. Which part do you disagree with: that people are sensitive to judgements related to parenting or that it's harder to get a principled argument from an emotional reaction? Or put differently, what is unique about this case where you don't think those rules apply?

It is a shallow dismissal, you've read it correctly. Your analogy was silly, parenting is emotional (and being emotional isn't negative), and the situation was quite straightforward and needed no simplification.

>It is a shallow dismissal, you've read it correctly. Your analogy was silly,

You may want to familiarize yourself with the HN guidelines:

>Please don't post shallow dismissals

>When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."

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

A better response could have either answered which of those points you actually disagree with and why, or if you don’t disagree with the points but just the analogy, offer up a better analogy.

>the situation was quite straightforward and needed no simplification.

To reiterate, the point of the analogy is not to simplify as you've suggested, but to cast it in a less emotional light given the impediments strong emotion can put up to rational discourse.

To clarify further, I never said emotions are are inherently negative. I did say they can inhibit a discussion that is trying to get to rational underlying principles. We have lots of societal arrangements that acknowledge and try to mitigate this fact. Considering your reaction and apparent unwillingness/inability to answer very direct questions related to parenting seems to prove that point, as do the other commenters who have acknowledged any comments on parenting can become a third-rail in discussion due to this fact.

Not a big fan of kids (as in having them around), not a dad, counterpoint: If there's one societal function that's fundamental it's having kids. I think forcing random people to put up with your children is probably the most defensible thing you can force upon other people.

Not to say that it's not great if you can be considerate to others while you have kids. But considering how inconsiderate kids are and how much everyone around you depends on you having kids, some amount of putting up with those kids, collectively, seems very okay.

I think society, in general, is fairly considerate of parents. But it also means, in certain contexts, parents need to be considerate of the rest of society. If your kid is being inconsiderate at a professional event, or church, or a movie theater etc., I think the reasonable thing to do is step outside until your child is able to come back to being considerate.

Is this an opinion you have as a parent or a non-parent?

Do parents not expect other parents to act with consideration to other members of society? I believe the fundamental principle remains the same in either instance.

Whether or not I have a disability does not change my mind about whether people in a wheelchair should board a plane first.

My kids get to be the absolute center of my world, but I’m careful not to expect them to be the center of anyone else’s.

being a parent changes your perception about the challenges other parents face. it is one thing for me as a parent to realize that my kid is disruptive and step outside unprompted, but quite another for someone to ask me to leave. the latter would make me very uncomfortable, and needs to be handled with extreme tact and consideration.

>the latter would make me very uncomfortable

Genuine question, but why would this make you feel uncomfortable?

>needs to be handled with extreme tact and consideration.

Did you think they acted without tact? By the authors own account, they seemed very polite and even sent a follow-up email. The founders account of the interaction made it seem even more polite (asking her if she needed help, offering to hold the baby, offering other areas where she could still hear the talk but not be as much of a distraction etc.)

being asked to leave implies that i am either oblivious towards the disruption my kids cause, or that i simply misjudge the situation and thought my kids are not as disruptive as the person asking me felt about it. both imply a judgement of my behavior, and that alone will make me uncomfortable. i do admit that i am biased by my experience in china where something like that would never happen as i explain here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41438834

not having experienced the situation i can't judge, but the fact that it prompted the person to write an article about it to me suggests that on some level it did make her feel uncomfortable. if it hadn't it wouldn't have been worth mentioning.

Sure. After reading both accounts, it came across to me that the founder with the baby was being overly sensitive and chose to steer into the least favorable interpretation. We should strive to be polite but we shouldn't avoid confrontation just because someone may take it the wrong way, especially when doing so comes at the detriment of other people's experiences.

having read the response now too, i have to agree

I hold myself to that standard but I also think that we should be tolerant of young children amongst us. We were all there once.

I don’t think anyone is advocating intolerance towards children, but rather trying to define what is reasonable. A loud child in a restaurant might be ok, but a child screaming and throwing food less so. After reading both accounts, I get the feeling the founder with a baby has an expectation that is miscalibrated to what most people consider would be reasonable.

after moving to china any preconceptions i had about western people being considerate of children (and parents) went out the window. chinese not only tolerate children, but they allow them to get away with anything, almost to a fault even. i have never once seen anyone complain about children. they bring them to work and they care when someone needs help in levels that a western parent would consider intrusive. and any disruption they simply ignore. after experiencing that, asking a parent to step outside to me now feels rather rude and inconsiderate.

Do you think this is how it's always been in China or do you think this is a response to how their attitudes towards children have changed?

The US tends to have a very individualistic outlook compared to many other societies, so I think differences should be expected to differ from culture to culture. In the US, it would make me very uncomfortable to have keep my child in a movie theater making noises if I felt like it was inhibiting on someone else's enjoyment of a movie, for instance.

i believe it has been like that all the time, because in the times without insurance and pensions children where the ones who cared for you when you get old and so people depended on their kids and it logically makes sense that they would show extreme care for them growing up. (this also reflects in the attitude of future grandparents who to this day push their children to get married and have kids. sometimes in extreme ways)

>the times without insurance and pensions children where the ones who cared for you when you get old and so people depended on their kids and it logically makes sense that they would show extreme care for them growing up

This has been the case for most agrarian economies, including the US in the past so I’m not sure that’s a good discriminator.

that's a fair point. i haven't read anything about how children were treated in china in the past. i am more familiar with stories about treatment of children in historical europe. in short, in europe children were seen as a necessary nuisance (someone mentioned cattle)

but from that i want to draw a few observations: i think attitude towards children in europe either has improved or it hasn't changed. if it hasn't changed, then why should it have changed in china? but even if it has improved, on one hand it is still way behind china by comparison, but on the other hand we stopped depending on direct children a few decades earlier than china, so if there was a parallel development then china would have to be a few decades behind europe with their changing attitude towards children. that being not the case suggests that there was no change in attitude at all, or at least not one prompted by a modern pension system and therefore the chinese attitude towards children could not be a new thing.

Even if they have changed, I seriously doubt you can distill something complex like societal interactions and norms down to a simple one-variable model like the introduction of pensions.

right. another reason why i am skeptical that any change happened.

Society norms definitely shift. My point is that that change is generally the result of a highly dynamic and complicated process, rather than pointing to a single cause.

This has not matched my experience in seeing children being raised in other countries in Asia, though I have not spent significant time in China itself, particularly around parents and their children, so I can't comment there. I will say that does not match the behavior I have seen of first generation or even second generation Chinese immigrants in America, however.

My anecdotal experience, primarily driven by my time in Japan as well as living in a place that has a very large Asian immigrant population is that they are as strict when it becomes to the behavior of their children as any Westerner, and often moreso. When I go to the local H-mart, I am far more likely to see a parent corralling their child and getting them to behave than when I see similar behavior out of kids from western parents at the Safeway

Perhaps this holds true in China itself, but I don't believe the distinction is purely East vs. West.

When I go to the local H-mart, I am far more likely to see a parent corralling their child and getting them to behave

i don't want to claim that my experience is the norm, but this sentence in particular reminded me that my distinct first impression in china was like "boy they do let their kids here get away with anything"

add to that the reputation of the single child policy creating "little emperors" because of how parents raise their child.

but again, this is just my experience. it may well possible that this is a small minority, and that i just never saw parents corralling their children because they possibly were already effective at raising them to be well behaved.

it is also worth noting that i observed a much higher tolerance at people behaving out of the norm. (but then it is also a much rarer occurrence and it is also not considered polite to confront people)

> But considering how inconsiderate kids are and how much everyone around you depends on you having kids, some amount of putting up with those kids, collectively, seems very okay.

Which is why letting you bring your kids, but then also politely letting you know when your kids are being a distraction should be a totally acceptable compromise.

The problem is only when a parent takes any amount of confrontation to be a form of societal oppression and writes an expose on it on Business Insider (for example).

Assume they know their kids are a distraction (the implication that they might not makes me cringe a little) and they still want to participate. How much is that a burden we share vs a right parents have to fight for and can be denied?

If it’s a free event, have at it. If I had to pay to attend, then I see it differently.

Just a nit, but there’s a big difference between establishing a social norm and establishing a legally protected right.

I am a father of three and I strongly disagree with you. I respect the right for others to enjoy their day without having to deal with someone else's loud or misbehaving children. I myself don't enjoy strangers' kids being loud and fully empathise with people who don't have kids. I have no problem removing myself and my children from a place is we're being a nuisance.

I'm generally quite strongly on the side of being considerate of other people for a continental European, but in the particular case of children I kind of disagree. Children are an annoying but absolutely necessary part of society. They will work for our pensions and care for us when we are old. They should be everyone's problem and responsibility, not just the parents.

> They will work for our pensions and care for us when we are old.

That sentence sent chills down my spine.

Life is an end in itself. It is a not a means to the ends of others. Your children are no more my responsibility than they are my tool to serve me in old age. My pension and care in old age is not their responsibility any more than their behaviour is my obligation to put up with.

If this sounds strange and overly "individualistic" then let me frame the issue in a slightly different way.

If we accept that children are an "absolutely necessary part of society" because "they will work for our pensions and care for us when we are old" then what happens if people choose not to have children? Are childless (by choice) people parasites in such a society? If more and more people decide to not have children is there a point where this becomes a social crises to the point where we start forcing people to have children?

And what about children who decide to emigrate as adults? Is there a point where you prevent people from travelling in order to guarantee that you have enough people around to pay pensions and take care of old people?

Not that it should matter, but I write this a middle-aged parent of two adult daughters who I do not hold to any sort of moral obligation to take care of me when I'm old. If they choose to then cool, I guess, but it's their life to live as they choose. The mere fact that they exist does not automatically obligate them to anyone else for any purpose.

>My pension and care in old age is not their responsibility any more than their behaviour is my obligation to put up with.

You may think this ought not be true, but as a matter of reality it is. Each generation carries the weight of the previous one through retirement. Is it just? I think so - but regardless of that, it is the agreement every child is born into.

>Are childless (by choice) people parasites in such a society?

Somewhat, but it is rude to point that out.

> You may think this ought not be true, but as a matter of reality it is. Each generation carries the weight of the previous one through retirement.

To the extent that this is true, it is by choice.

> Is it just? I think so - but regardless of that, it is the agreement every child is born into.

"Agreement" presupposes the consent of each party. You cannot be entered into an "agreement" without your own participation in the act of agreeing.

Children cannot consent, therefore this is no "agreement" by definition.

What you have called an "agreement" is more appropriately referred to as a "duty." There is a very critical distinction between the two concepts which I will elaborate on in a moment.

> Somewhat, but it is rude to point that out.

What do manners have to do with anything?

What you're describing is the concept of duty. You're saying that by virtue of just being born, a child is obligated to care for his or her elders through retirement and that their personal choices are irrelevant.

In this case there is a very important question: "What are you going to do about it when the child says 'no'?"

You can either do nothing, which is a valid option, but it means that the entire concept and discussion was moot. You can invent "duties" all you want, but people ultimately get to decide how to live their own lives and there's nothing you can do about it.

Or, you can pass laws and use force in order to compel people to do certain things "for the good of society."

Which brings me to why I asked the question: "Are people who choose to be child-free parasites?"

That's a very important question because if a "society" depends on children in order to pay peoples' pensions and to take care of them when they are older, and that dependence is so fundamental that we consider people who choose not have children "parasites", and we obligate children to a duty to take care of elders ... then you've weakened the recognition of individual rights (at least reproductive rights and the right to travel / emigrate) to such an extent that you've opened the door to banning contraception, abortion and freedom of travel.

>To the extent that this is true, it is by choice.

For anyone in a western country it is not by choice. Your wages get taxed and put towards social security, elderly housing, and Medicare (or equivalent). The work you do to get those wages keeps companies in business, meaning the stock portfolios of those that built them for retirement have value and can be liquidated. Unless you fully disconnect from society, you are responsible for the retirement of those who came before you.

>You're saying that by virtue of just being born, a child is obligated to care for his or her elders through retirement and that their personal choices are irrelevant.

This is putting words into my mouth. I have never prescribed anything, just described things as I see them. It seems plainly obvious to me that simply by working and living, you are putting fuel into the machine that powers your elders' retirement.

>Or, you can pass laws and use force in order to compel people to do certain things "for the good of society."

We already do this, try your luck with the IRS after not paying your social security tax. I do not understand how you envision the world.

I think the question comes down to what is reasonable accommodation. As others have said, allowing you to bring your child to the conference seems reasonable. As does asking you to step outside when your child becomes a distraction.

In the US workforce, there are laws about what constitutes a reasonable accommodation for a disability. If you have a mobility restriction, it’s reasonable to ask for a first floor office, but not that the owner install an elevator.

"Would you like to stroll your baby outside? I want people to get the full experience out of this conference."

According to response from the organizer, the offer here was to help the mom get the full experience by offering her accommodations so that she doesn't have to miss any part of the presentation despite having her child with her.

Congratulations on fully understanding the situation. There are a lot of such failed provocations unfortunately. Like the short movie in Poland with the lady on the bus who showed a piece of footage in which the bus driver asks her out of the vehicle, and it was an article along the lines of ‘he asked me out of the bus because I was with my child’, while the entire surveillance footage of the bus reveals that the driver asked the mother to fasten her pram with a seatbelt in a suitable place. She refused and the driver asked her out because she did not comply with his instructions and rules related to transport. People who have children completely fail to understand or do not want to understand people who have made a conscious decision not to have them.

Thanks for this comment, your commentary is uplifting.

The person on the other side of this interaction wrote her response: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/surbhi-sarna_elevating-the-po...

Without seeing the full context I have a hard time deciding but I think the founder with a baby jumped to assuming the worst interpretaion and then got attention by feeding into existing stereotypes.

This specific interaction was probably not a good situation to turn into a whole post about systemic barriers. There are probably better examples. Making these things into social viral communications reduces the overall positive effect that can be made.

"Trust that I would step out if my child were actually disturbing anyone."

Key word here is trust, which I think many have lost the ability to provide to others since the pandemic. We live in a jaded society and sometimes people will project their opinions from positions of power that aren't quite justified.

Good on the author for being capable of doing so much and taking conflict in stride!

The problem is it leaves the entire interpretation of what is or is not a distraction up to the mother. The founder obviously thought the baby was being distracting enough to (politely) ask her to step outside.

I've been at professional events with infants; as long as the infant was quiet there's no issue. But I think the it's also reasonable to defer to the attendees who also deserve a professional environment free of distractions. It's hard to know without all the details, but the author must have felt there was some distraction, or I doubt she would have moved to the back to begin with.

> When he started babbling and cooing, I moved to the back of the room. That's when someone approached me and said, "Would you like to stroll your baby outside? I want people to get the full experience out of this conference."

It sounds like the child was indeed disturbing people. The author may have not be in alignment with the rest of the audience as far as what behavior is disturbing.

The headline's characterization seems designed to stoke outrage over something that appears to be fairly mundane. From my reading, she was politely asked to stroll her baby out of the room, whereas the headline makes it sound like she was kicked out of the conference because kids are not welcome.

In my experience, it's very common to simply exit the room with your kid in these kinds of situations and return after they've quieted down, just as a courtesy to those who are there to listen and to be heard.

I recognize the mother is suggesting her kid wasn't very noisy, but I also know that parents are often biased and protective of their kids and can't always see things the way everyone else does. I guess it all hinges on "was the kid sufficiently noisy", but it's probably not worth litigating the subjectivity in this type of extremely common occurrence.

“Right away, I noticed no other babies”.

It was a business conference, not a creche or playground and the norm for such environments IS adults only.

“That's when someone approached me and said, "Would you like to stroll your baby outside? I want people to get the full experience out of this conference.””

A perfectly reasonable request that I’d expect and have even proactively accommodated by stepping outside (vs just towards back of room) if I’d decided to attend with a baby. Author may not have felt her kid was noisy but chances are, the YC staff that approached her had noticed or been informed by other attendees that the noise was at distracting level.

“I’m not naming this woman because I think the problem is bigger than me or her. It's about this tension in the business world right now. To many people, including me, the pandemic showed that it was possible to be a hands-on mom and a hands-on business partner. Others want to maintain the status quo of business and babies as entirely separate. To me, that's ridiculous. To ask me to leave with a quietly cooing baby during a talk that was explicitly about the challenges of being a mother and founder was shocking. I realized then that the monster of systemic barriers to entrepreneurs who are also moms is bigger than I ever realized”.

It would be indeed be foolish to antagonize a YC partner in print over a paper thin argument that’s riddled with holes. Systemic barriers to female entrepreneurs including mothers exist but this wasn’t an instance of that and to suggest otherwise is what’s ridiculous.

I understand feeling this way, generically. Let's imagine a public speech. In a small room. Dead quiet except for speaker. There's a suddenly loud happy baby, competing with the adult speaker for volume. They take 2 minutes to wheel the baby to the back of the room, that's only 30 feet away, so nothing really changes in terms of noise elvel. And another woman politely approaches them with their line asking if they'd like to take it outside.

The thing is at that point, I have jumped to a # of conclusions: small room, disruptive over long period of time, dead quiet, and acceded to this odd cultural view I never saw anywhere other than moneyed SV and extreme money that talking obliquely means you're being polite.

The article doesn't give us data to justify the conclusions I jumped to, but it does give us enough data to know this was a near-platonic caricature of a situation where the unprofessional bit isn't the baby making noise. It was during a talk about the practical challenges of being a founder with an infant, at an event targeted towards being more inclusive to female founders.

The event being centred on female founders doesn’t mean attendees at such an event cannot find a baby’s activity disruptive.

Seeing the post from the staff member involved [1] further outlines the founder’s mischaracterization of events: The YC staff member says founder was actually offered use of alternative spaces where she could still hear the talk, both parties had a discussion during the break, she stayed for the entire conference and was never asked to leave.

[1] https://www.linkedin.com/posts/surbhi-sarna_elevating-the-po...

Parent of 2. Babies are distracting by design:) they cannot talk and they can only get attention by crying/cooing, and we are wired to listen and prioritize the sound of babies crying/cooing over other activities to guarantee their survival:therefore if there's a baby crying/cooing at a conference the attendees will give priority to the baby over the speaker. I personally didn't think it was rude to ask to go strolling outside as this was from my perspective distracting for the participants.

After reading the few details in the article, it sounds like it could have just been a disagreement about when a baby's noises cross the line into "distraction."

Was the talk recorded so we can judge for ourselves? :)

I would like to lean into having kids at work whenever practical and having them eventually become apprentices to possibly do similar work when they grow up. This has been the historical norm for farmers, shopkeepers, craftsman etc and in my opinion beats institutionalized childcare and staying in college until age of 30 to get a good job.

However I kind of wonder if the author would support that or suddenly switch to standard talking points about institutionalized childhood. Are moms and dads in the company she founded bringing kids to office daily instead of dropping them off at daycare?

Office workers are already riled up about the noisiness of open office environments. Seems doubtful they'll embrace having children added to the din.

She's advocating for childcare in the workplace. From the article:

>If you really want to make a difference for parents, offer on-site childcare.

The world is far too cruel to children, and sees them primarily as nuisance. Part of this is because of increased childlessness, leaving people without the experience of dealing with young children previous generations had. Parents deserve to be able to go to all kinds of events.

I disagree with your reason, but agree with your conclusion. We've been pretty unforgiving and cruel to both mothers and children for a long, long time.

I'm not suited for raising children as a primary parent, but I'm happy to be part of that village raising kids.

I think the callousness towards parents is earned. I have seen children destroy gardens and when parents are told they show no remorse or attempts to reprimand the child. You are told to calm down they are just being kids. Of course this leads to people seeing children as a nuisance.

I agree. I'm a parent with two (now adult) daughters. I'm not intolerant of other peoples' children because I am personally child-free or was an only child (though I was). I'm intolerant of other peoples' children when those children draw attention to themselves.

If your kid is quiet and keeps to themselves, then I haven't even noticed them in the first place in order to take issue. The reason I take issue is because your kid is being loud or obnoxious and ruining my experience in (grocery store | restaurant | movie theatre | public transportation | anywhere that I'm politely minding my own business but your kid is forcing me to know that it exists).

As people like to say when discussing rights and freedoms: your rights end where my nose begins.

My wife and I recently travelled to Walt Disney World for a vacation. While in a hotel lobby we walked past a child around 8 or 9 years-old (if I had to guess) accompanied by a man that I assumed was his father. As we walked past, the kid punched my wife in the arm. It wasn't a mistake. He telegraphed the hell out of it. When I confronted the father he just smiled and shrugged it off.

If people didn't constantly have to deal with situations like the above, then we could talk about being more tolerant towards other peoples' children.

But if it's not a child invading physical boundaries, it's auditory. God help those of us with misophonia that have to listen to children make the most hideous noises (and not always due to a temper tantrum, sometimes it's just loud screeching or yelling as part of play or whatever).

Why should anyone have to tolerate this? And no, I don't blame the children, I blame the parents. But who is at fault is irrelevant. No one should be obligated to put up with assholes whether those assholes are 40 years-old or 4 years-old.

> Part of this is because of increased childlessness

Another way of phrasing this is more people are choosing not to have children - one motivation probably being that they can actually be quite a nuisance, a sentiment I've heard from literally every parent I've ever talked to.

Parents do deserve to go to all kinds of events - and generally are allowed to. Parents do not have the right to disturb events for people who choose not to have kids.

That is true but not really what I was getting at. Because there are fewer children today, the average person has no casual interaction with children in their day to day, something that was rare in days past. This has led to the idea that children do not belong anywhere that is not explicitly a "family area" which disqualifies them (parents) from going places they need to be, such as events focused on the importance of being a mother and business owner!

Of course parents can go to all kinds of events - sometimes they just have to arrange for childcare.

I have seen good speakers with large audiences and screaming babies that can make a quip along the lines “baby, your skepticism is healthy, but let me convince you, I have done my homework” that is funny at least once, everyone relaxes, and it doesn’t kick anyone out. If the baby keeps yapping, parents will usually find another place anyway.

Also onsite daycare would be a honking great business idea for so many events, including but not limited to company holiday parties.

It's kind of hard to tell from the article, but given the timing and the linkedin response about 2024 (and the picture), it seems like this is actually about bringing a 3 year old to conference, not an infant.

It is, I have to say, so inexplicable (especially given the topic of the talk) that they would do this as a result of a baby "cooing", that I wonder if this is an accurate description of events?

https://web.archive.org/web/20240903143023/https://www.busin...

Doesn’t work for me, the other archive link in this thread works though.

Works ok for me. But the other link is still better, as it has the picture while this one doesn’t.

> I later learned she was one of the partners of Y Combinator.

> I'm not naming this woman because I think the problem is bigger than me or her

Yet they are attacking her in the press and giving a specific enough description to damage her reputation...

<jest> Well the baby was neither a founder nor a female, sooo... </jest>

Yet!

- "baby was neither a founder"

"Show HN" is way more exciting when you don't yet have object permanence

Where'd the startup go?! :D Now you see it–now it's been acquired by Google

ROFL!

(typed from my phone while still rolling)

Surely a baby would have better ideas than some start ups...

And so we come full circle to "Goo-gle".

The incident is illustrative, not ironic. So, given the example, what's the solution?

Didn't people used to get in trouble for "working from home" when they were actually parenting instead?

... at a Y Combinator event.

I've been to several (scientific) conferences including babies. They sometimes make a small disturbance, but I don't think anyone has ever taken offence at this.

> I'm not naming this woman because I think the problem is bigger than me or her.

Probably A Better Person than I, but I'm in the privileged position of not being a man and not trying start a career. A YCombinator representative suggesting that a mother with a baby leaves in a talk specifically in a talk on "Mothering experience while starting a business" seems to send a very strong signal about what Y Combinator thinks of this situation.

I would be kinda mad if someone came with a (noisy) baby during a presentation of a conference paper I spend months working on, plus facing the stress of selection. They are professionals to keep care of them when needed, there is no valid reason besides saving a few bucks bringing a baby there.

When I did YC I often had office hours with PG and JL while their son crawled around on the floor. It was very family friendly. I loved that, and it taught me good lessons that have been helpful now that I have kids of my own.

I'm worried YC has "jumped the shark". The blocking of constructive criticism from people who have helped build this place is very sad.

Maybe they need Founder Mode again.

Or, the lady is downplaying her baby’s noise.

Keep in mind, there are many people who can be more susceptible than others to noises. I know a few autistic folks who would have a very difficult time.

> the lady is downplaying her baby’s noise.

Do you have children? Don't you think those of us who do know exactly what the maximum amount of noise a baby can make is? Might we have concluded that even if that maximum noise level was reached (I wasn't there but from accounts I bet it was 1% of that), that it should have been celebrated, and applauded, and spun in a positive way, rather than how it was handled?

Nope, and even if it was 1% (doubt it) it’s still okay to ask someone to stop.

Humans have evolved to find baby noises very disruptive, so even a low quiet noise can be distracting. A mother might be more used to baby noises and okay with a level the average person might not be.

And again, people have conditions where they can find quieter noises distracting.

Why does someone’s medical condition suddenly have to take a back seat to exiting a venue when your baby makes noise.

If I ever have children, I wouldn’t subject others around me to things like this. You have a responsibility to other people in society. Your child isn’t special and doesn’t deserve consideration above medical conditions.

Should have used the baby as a prop or call to action in a booth, or unveiled a way for VCs to monetize it, and I'm sure ears would have perked up then.

See, I thought pretty much this exact same thing! Someone missed a golden opportunity there...

Am I the only one who was disappointed in reading "female founders"? Dads would have the same issue.

Society hasn't adjusted yet completely to the idea that dads might have the same role that mums-only had in the past.

That's some crappy behavior by the YC partner at any event let alone one targetted at women. If the baby was screaming/crying ok sure. But come on.

You are assuming she's explaining the situation correctly, in an unbiased way. I think there was context and nuance to the situation she may have intentionally left out.

It is almost always "child free" people that are massively disturbed by even the quietest child noises. I can only speculate as to the (obvious) reasons for this attitude which gives me some level of compassion and even sorrow for those people.

You're being gaslit by most of the comments here but you're not imagining things - there's been a huge shift from an attitude of "children, even other peoples' children, are our future so it's reasonable to tolerate some noise from them" to "children are a dirty loud nuisance that must be stopped".

Again, the reasons for this seem obvious to me but you're an asshole if you point them out explicity.

> there's been a huge shift from an attitude of "children, even other peoples' children, are our future so it's reasonable to tolerate some noise from them" to "children are a dirty loud nuisance that must be stopped"

Plenty of ancient civilisations treated children as glorified cattle. They weren’t expected to survive, so it wasn’t irrational. The notion of a babbling baby in the Roman Senate, a Victorian ball or Meiji Dai Shin’in is laughable.

We are more considerate of babies and parents than we’ve probably ever been as a society. That’s a good thing. But it’s also regularly abused, as anyone who has been on a plane with a child screaming for their iPad knows.

What solution do you propose for the noisy child on a plane? Throw them out?

> What solution do you propose for the noisy child on a plane? Throw them out?

Same things one does with a misbheaving adult. Note that I specifically mention kids screaming about iPads because I'm not judging parents of infants.

> The notion of a babbling baby in the Roman Senate, a Victorian ball or Meiji Dai Shin’in is laughable.

Yes because those institutions didn't have a lot of women or mothers in them, and the people participating in them had servants and slaves that took care of their progeny.

I know the reality of the modern world hasn't reached everyone yet but we don't exclude mothers from public life any more so maybe the idea of having children in public bodies isn't that "laughable" any more.

> because those institutions didn't have a lot of women or mothers in them, and the people participating in them had servants and slaves that took care of their progeny

Correct. I'm challenging the notion that we "tolerate[d] some noise from" children in the past. (Though even in matriarchal societies, e.g. the Haudenosaunee / Iroquois, I don't recall reading about children in the Long House where official business was conducted.)

> the modern world hasn't reached everyone yet but we don't exclude mothers from public life any more so maybe the idea of having children in public bodies isn't that "laughable" any more

Perhaps. But if we are to have that discussion, it has to be honest about that being novel.

What reasons are those?

Humans are evolutionarily evolved to listen to babies. It makes even quiet noises annoying.

> Humans are evolutionarily evolved to listen to babies. It makes even quiet noises annoying.

It's funny, once you have kiddos, you learn to be able to tell the type of crying they are doing. Some cries are really for attention that an adult needs to attend to right this second, some are just noise, and then there's everything in between. Once you're around infants enough, you kinda just tune out the less important crying, just like you would a fan or a car engine. But, it is a skill you learn, and can lose.

So, parents of young children, I think, really can't see what the big deal is. They're skilled at tuning out the cries that aren't important.

If the baby wasn't a founder makes total sense

Five minutes with a lawyer, and baby can be a co-founder.

I saw the baby's application and it was terrible. Hadn't even launched anything (other than vomit) yet. The good news is he can keep applying. In fact, the average person in YC applied 2.4 times before being accepted.

expect more of this

childless flights

childless restaurants

childless hotels

childless theaters

etc etc

all driven by soulless, self-centered singles and childless couples who cannot abide anything but a world that exists only for their personal indulgence

just wait a generation until these vapid reptiles start to expire and their bloodlines disappear forever...memorialized only in a plaque on a bench in the office plaza where their VC used to be

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