Princeton mom: Women have a 'shelf life' | Hacker News Reader

Princeton mom: Women have a 'shelf life'

money.cnn.com

10 pointsjkuria10 comments

The bigger issue that I see in today's college crowd is just a lack of vision for their future. This isn't about man or woman. I don't mean someone should know in glorious detail what they want to be doing in 10, 20, 30 years, but there should at least broad strokes that represent some kind of plan.

How about a simple question for a man or a woman - Do you want to have a family one day? If so, have you thought about how your current choices will affect your ability to have kids or even raise kids? Along the lines of the article - How serious are you with wanting to be married or have a long term relationship? I find it faulty logic to believe that someone can meet their life partner at college but it certainly doesn't hurt to be aware of the possibility.

I find such inquiries are given the bare minimum in thought. I am sorry to say that no one can have it all. It is not a gender thing. Everything in life has trade-offs.

The strange thing is, people change. If you had asked me even 10 years ago if I wanted kids, I'd have said absolutely not. Now, I'm a happy father.

Agreed. People change.

Hopefully, if one does change their mind, they are still in a position to do what they want without their previous life choices becoming too much of an obstacle.

For those interested, she expressed her rationale further on the Huffington Post[0].

[0]: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/susan-patton/why-i-told-female...

"It doesn't address how unsatisfying it is for exceptionally well educated women to be with men who are not their intellectual equal." -TFA

This is what is wrong with the class system in the USA.

This has come up repeatedly on HN in various forms, but it looks like women in all walks of life are seriously underserved by current online dating systems, and there is likely a big market opportunity there despite all the incumbents.

She brings up an interesting point. I'd be curious to see some data on women who date "beneath" them (particularly career wise) in terms of relationship stability.

Personally, I know of many women who date men who are not as intelligent or financially successful. However, frankly, the women are (without mincing words) fat, which corroborates the related NYTimes article [0]: "Using longitudinal survey data on married American couples, it found that women can compensate for two additional units of body mass index with one more year of education."

The more attractive and successful women I know tend to date equally or more financially successful men (it is difficult to be more intelligent than these women, so it can only be said that the men have very lucrative jobs or come from wealthy families).

[0] http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/01/women-and-marri...

One of the interesting effects of college is that they self select for their "kind" of people. I wonder if this is part of the problem or the solution.

I thought that it was politically incorrect to speak of such things. I guess it is ok if you are a woman.

There was actually some blowback, noteably this: http://nymag.com/thecut/2013/03/princeton-mom-to-all-student...

Of course, it won't affect Patton much. <%= ruling_class_joke %>

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