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I am a woman and I feel disadvantaged compared to men in two ways when it comes to family life:

Just a completely ridiculous attitude and an example of the article.

Very few men, especially in this day and age" get to say "I want to have 5 kids" or "let's stop at 2 kids" or "I do not want to be a parent".

You are not disadvantaged compared to men in this way, you are incredibly advantaged. Literally have authority over this in a zillion ways men do not.

And the extra decade without family responsibilities without limiting your options for spouses, I would argue, is the biggest differentiator in the workplace successes.

And that's the reason for the article. Women have been told they can have it all: 5 kids and workplace success.

na gonna happen

What? Do you only engage in relationships where you're stepped on?

Plenty of men I know have the conversation about how many kids to have or not have. Yes, biologically women do the child-bearing, but it is -- for most couples -- a conversation, a joint decision. Like deciding whether to move to Florida or take care of the aging parents or which career to prioritize.

As is so often true of the poor-me-I'm-a-disadvantaged-man crowd, it sounds like you are choosing to associate with unpleasant people. Respect yourself, and find someone who respects you. Sounds like it would be a nice change.

I am a male and I feel disadvantaged compared to females.

My average life expectancy in the United States is 75.35 years. Female life expectancy is 80.51 years. I can expect to miss out on over 5 years of life as compared to females. This would be the time I would expect to spend as a grandparent. It means I will miss out on a significant portion of my grandchildren's lives. I will probably not see my great grandchildren. Additionally, because of this life expectancy issue I never met one of my grandfather's. The second was experiencing late stage dementia by the time I was old enough to communicate with him. Thus, as a male child I never was able to share the experience or gain examples that female children had with their grandmother's.

FWIW the vast majority of my friends married in the 20-28 yr old range, as did I. I don't see it as much of a time limit practically really. The ones that married later, I don't know if the sample is large enough at that point, but they all had careers that had them moving from one city to another, so maybe avoid that so that you can stay in one place long enough to make meaningful connections I recommend.

For your second point, yes there is an asymmetry, but I say it's more that the vast majority of everybody I know, their spouse is +/-2yr of their age. I know more couples where the wife is at least five yrs older than the husband than the other way, though the men were in their late twenties when they married. Again the sample size may be too small to draw conclusions from.

> FWIW the vast majority of my friends married in the 20-28 yr old range, as did I. I don't see it as much of a time limit practically really.

There's another angle on this issue. Evidence is accumulating that the reported big increase in autism-spectrum disorders is correlated with late marriage. No one knows why, so it's only a correlation at this point, but it's pretty reliable -- late marriage and late childbearing equals more autism disorders.

http://www.science20.com/science_motherhood/autism_does_incr...

Quote: "In unadjusted analyses, both mean maternal age and mean paternal age were significantly higher for ASD cases than for the birth cohort as a whole."

Don't take this in the wrong way, but if spend a lot of time thinking about how unfair things are when there is nothing you can do about it, its going to cause a lot of unnecessary stress in your life.

I think its better to acknowledge the limitations of life and do the best you can.

It sounds like you have planned yourself into a box. Maybe it would be better to take it a step at a time and see how it goes?

She's speaking theoretically. But it's the cold fact for women: have kids before you're 40 and disrupt your career (if you're going for an intensive career where goals must be met) or don't have (your own) kids. I'm a woman and whatever way I look at it, it sums up to that.

Yep. And if you have kids and disrupt the career you're an argument for why women shouldn't be paid as much or selected for the leadership track and if you don't have kids you'll still be judged as if you could pop one out at any moment (and so be paid less and not selected for the leadership track).

It is kind of odd to work for something for years and then feel like you're pouring gasoline all over it and throwing a match: that's how I feel about my career and its collision-to-come with kids. It sucks. Oh well.

I'm a man, and I have observed a similar situation ("disrupt your career") holds if I take into account my own vision of how I want to raise my kid. I have had to make some re-adjustments, compromises, changes to the objective function of my life. And that's OK.

If I didn't want to deal with difficult-to-foresee, potentially life-altering consequences of factors outside my control, probably having a kid would not be a good idea.

This is serious stuff, but I don't understand the sense of gloom that seems to pervade these choices, which are, after all, rather joyful in both cases ("fully-realized and consequential career" vs. "parent of a child"). Is it the pain of saying goodbye to a version of yourself that will never be actualized? What about the version that will be?

That's a really good comment you make, and in the exact spirit to the article. She's right - you do have to just decide not to 'play the game'. We, as a society, can make a difference here by hiring parents with young children or ready to have families, being generous where we can, and making time flexible. The issue at hand really only applies to the status quo which we know can topple at any moment given the right circumstances.

Here's an elegant analogy in this vein (from http://broodwork.com/index.php?/projects/andrew-berardini/, which my wife puts together), by art critic and parent Andrew Berardini:

"Let's say gravity suddenly shifted a little making everyone a little bit lighter. It would likely make the news circuit for a while and make movers and other professional lifters particularly happy. But after the scientists had explained again and again why it happened and all the potential story lines had been exhausted by newspapers and television pundits, religious zealots and idle conversationalists (“How about that gravity?”), we would accept it, perhaps with a individual joy all our own.

Which is to say, even though a slight shift in gravity on Earth literally changes everything on our home planet, after awhile we’d adjust. Occasionally we might think back to the days before gravity changed with wonder and even nostalgia, but we’d know that everything being lighter is just better on one of those annoyingly and truistically difficult-to-communicate levels and continue with the practice of everyday life, with appropriate changes to this new state of lightness.

Parenting for me is something like this."

Thank you for this.

You can freeze eggs now.

You can also use fertility treatments to get twins, large family, compressed timeline.