I think this post is skipping the crucial factor in all this. It's not about children--at least not directly. It's about risk.
Several years ago I read an article that analyzed the work preferences of the genders. It demonstrably showed that:
- Men are more likely to do riskier jobs;
- Men are more likely to travel further to work (including internationally);
- Women tend to choose that are closer to home.
Basically it came down to risk-aversion. Women are, on the whole, more averse to risk than men.
A startup, compared to any salaried job, is far riskier. You can work for years on substandard pay and much longer hours and end up nothing. Of course you could also end up a millionaire (or even a billionaire).
Obviously children will be a factor for some (both men and women but more women than men, on the whole) and you can argue that the risk aversion is a product of the child factor but I think you see these same traits in women who are childless (so you then have to stretch the child factor to women who may one day have children, which applies to pretty much any women under 40 so is really a non-argument).
Tech Crunch had a post about this a few months ago. The tech press wants to write stories about women entrepreneurs. Companies and business schools have diversity policies the result of which is that the entrance requirement for women are generally lower than their male counterparts.
Equality isn't the same thing as being identical. If less than 50% of entrepreneurs or programmers are women is not a failure of equal opportunity. Nowadays there aren't any barriers preventing women from taking these paths (quite the opposite, actually). It's simply that less women choose these routes.
"Nowadays there aren't any barriers preventing women from taking these paths (quite the opposite, actually). It's simply that less women choose these routes."
Begging the question. As you point out, there are no laws or physical barriers preventing women in the US from doing just about anything, so their heavy relative underrepresentation means by definition they're choosing not to. The question is: why not? Choices aren't made in a vacuum. What is it about our culture and society that has led to the percentage of women in tech/computing to drop pretty much consistently since the field was invented while their numbers increase in many other formerly all-male professions?
You posit that women are observed to be more risk-averse, and that this explains why they avoid founding startups. Leaving aside whether this is true, I repeat my question: why?
(Tangentially, as I think someone else pointed out, the "women are biologically risk-averse" trope can only explain why women "choose" to not found startups, not why they "choose" to not work as a dev at a big tech company, for example, where the risk level is close to nil. Have you looked at the health benefits/maternity leave/termination policies at places like IBM or Microsoft?)
Everyone loves to triangulate complex evolutionary explanations to this kind of question, but a cultural argument is even simpler to make: women get paid less, are taken less seriously, are subject to glass ceilings, harassment, discrimination, have a higher probability of being raped, etc etc, every single day. Moreover, women are explicitly told from an early age not to dress too provocatively, never leave a drink unattended, never ever ever walk home alone at night. . .and that's leaving aside the more subtle cultural pressures that discourage them from the sciences. Women are at higher "risk" than men just by virtue of their gender, and they're reminded of this, with an implicit or explicit injunction to be careful, all the damned time. That might serve as a reasonable explanation for why they'd be more risk-averse, but is unfortunate in that it can't be shrugged aside with a trite evolutionary explanation.
Just because there are no laws preventing women from doing something does not mean that the playing field is equal.
Yes, women are more risk averse... but why is that? Is it possible it cycles back to the same instinctual genealogical pulls to continue the bloodline?
BS! The highest risk in the modern world for both men and women is to form a lasting marriage with children!
The difference as in other professions is the unfair and unjust burden women face in having a family as Men of the world are not yet up to the task of full sharing of child rearing duties.
Has very little to do with the want..cost of the want however different story
As I read this, I couldn't stop thinking about my sister:
Age 25 - met her future husband
Age 26 - got married
Age 27 - Child #1
Age 27 - graduated law school
Age 29 - Child #2
Age 33 - Child #3
Age 35 - Child #4
Age 39 - Child #5
Age 46 - Child #6
Now - runs a minor league baseball team
(I don't really know how she does it. But, then again, no one does.)
You know, rats can have more offspring than your sister in just a month. I don't see what's admirable about fulfilling one's biological destiny. And who cares about law school or baseball teams? If she had gotten a PhD in Quantum Field Theory while raising 6 kids, then...
She seems to have the tendency to take what is true for her and extrapolate that to a general theory of what is true for everyone else. Oh well, certainly not the first person to do that.
wow. this is a real sad story :( Looks like she got lied into to the whole Feminism lie of "you gotta get a career" and ended up getting an abortion. Then, she did it again.
From the headline, I was hoping this involved some research, some sort of new finding, at least with tentative causality ("because" is hard to prove, but there is evidence that is more persuasive and less persuasive). But it's just someone's opinion based on anecdotes.
And it's not really a new one: the "women do more/less of X because they want to have a family" argument is written about all the time. It vies with "inherent biological differences" and "discrimination" for the most-frequently-suggested explanation for gender differences in any field. You can get dozens of entire books on it.
It's also somewhat at odds with the (admittedly spotty) research that's been done in the area. For example, one in-depth series of case studies found that a large proportion of women who opted out of work to raise a family did so largely because they wanted out of the work, rather than because they wanted to raise a family and weren't able to do the work at the same time: quitting to raise a family was the plan B that they turned to when plan A (have a career) turned out to suck for various reasons: http://www.amazon.com/Opting-Out-Women-Really-Careers/dp/052...
On the other hand, it's perfectly fine for people to write personal blog posts about their own experiences. I think I'm mostly objecting to the attempt to generalize it based on one example; a "why I quit my startup to raise a family" post would've been fine.
Agreed, this is pretty much a shallow version of the same argument that many people have been making for quite some time now. It would also seem to suggest that we should see major shortages of women in other fields that are extremely intense to start out in (medicine and law, for instance), and IIRC the gender ratios there are much more balanced. "Working hard" is not something women tend to be put off by; "building software", on the other hand, is, and I think any helpful suggestion needs to avoid catching the first in the same net as the second.
IMO the main reason this is getting attention is that it's a woman and she's not arguing the "discrimination" line. That's fine and all, but at this point it just seems like fanning the flames rather than adding anything new to the conversation.
Really, most of this whole debate is a polarization issue: the only people that care very much about this are at the fringes, either arguing the "men are pigs" position or getting really pissed off about people arguing the same. I think there's probably a balance between "discrimination" and "inherent biological differences" that conspire to turn women off from programming altogether, but each side is working so hard to shut the other side down completely that we don't see any balanced views coming out of this debate.
Ignoring even Penelope Trunk's tendency to extrapolate from her experiences to the rest of the female world, the conclusion she's drawing doesn't actually follow from her own experiences. She says she's taking time away from her third startup to spend time with her children. Therefore women don't do startups because they want to have time with their children. What now? Wouldn't that suggest rather that women who want to do startups can do so and then have time for children afterwards?
The internet has actually enabled a whole generation of female entrepreneurs to 'do their start-up thing' and have children to boot.
It's the perfect tool to have a company and be around the house all day long (or as long as you want to be), I'm not exactly female but I would have found it very hard to decide for children if I had been a person with a 9 to 5 job.
If you and your spouse can work together on a start-up (not always the best for everybody, but there are definitely cases were it worked very well and plenty were it worked good enough) then you can find some pretty good splits between raising children and running a company.
Things like web design and programming go very well with working from home and raising kids, I see it as a win for everybody.
If your idea of a start-up is to have lots of employees, a huge office and turnover in the millions then that's another case entirely, but on a lesser scale it is perfectly doable.
Yup. Didn't we only yesterday have an Ask HN thread on side projects that are making money?
The great thing about software today is how much you can do on a small scale. If her theory about commitment was correct, you would have a bunch of women who had started small side projects and then said "oh this has really taken off and I don't want to work 100 hours a week so I want to sell it". Where are they then?
I am pretty convinced that the answer is a lot simpler and is simply related to the number of women who code in the first place.
Agreed. If you have a husband with a job, you don't have to starve to death. Starting a start-up is safer.
Theoretically if you're a man with a wife with a job, you can do the same thing... except there are a lot fewer wives that are willing to do that than husbands.
The author points out that women who want to have kids can't wait very long, generally don't have time to do a startup first, and that you'd have to be crazy to try to do a startup and raise young kids at the same time.
I'm not sure that I believe her arguments about men, though:
For men it’s different. We all know that men do not search all over town finding the perfect ballet teacher. Men are more likely to settle when it comes to raising kids. The kids are fine. Men are more likely than women to think they themselves are doing a good job parenting. This makes sense from an evolutionary perspective. Men have to trust that the kids will be okay so that they can leave and go get food or make more kids.
It seems to me that she's ignoring the most important factor: Men have more time to do a startup before having children because men are usually older than their wives.
The average age difference is 2 years, but I wouldn't be surprised if the gap increases with education and income.
(Then again, maybe this is just wishful thinking from a single 29 year old who still hopes to get married and have 2.5 children some day.)
I'm with you as I'm also a single 29 year old working 80 hour weeks on my startup, and still hoping one day to get married and have a lot of kids.
The difference is though, we as men can (hopefully) keep spending 80 hour weeks on work now, get insanely rich by 35, meet a woman of our dreams at 40, get married at 45, and have kids at 50. Women don't have that option.
I know at least 8 married-with-kids guys in the startup scene. None of their wives are more than a year or two younger (and in some cases, several years older). But their wives all have a very different career path.
I'd like to call bullshit on this one. Disclaimer: I'm probably one of those insane women who wants to do a startup.
1) I'm tired of articles like these which have little to no research backing up their claims on why there are so few women doing startups. Penelope isn't making a sweeping generalization in the article, but she might as well make a generalization here - the effect is quite the same.
2) I'm also tired of the set of women I refer to as "the angry feminists" who are easily insulted everytime someone (especially a male author/speaker) points out that there are so few women in tech or that women lack qualities X and Y to do a startup. To all the women of the afore-mentioned category, you're wasting your time. An ounce of action is better than a ton of theories.
3) And last, I honestly don't know why there are so few women in tech. I don't have theories. All I know is that there ARE few women in tech (and fewer doing startups). I don't think we are all risk-averse. Sure, some of us may not like taking chances, but I'm pretty sure it's not every one of us.
I've been involved in writing software all my adult life. I'd like to do a startup one day. It's a tough world out there if you're doing anything on your own, irrespective of your gender. So stop analyzing and start doing.
Had this article been written by a man, people would zero in immediately on Penelope's real issue:
She is trying to blame her failure on being a woman.
She's started several startups, and each time has failed to create anything that matched her original entrepreneurial dreams. Unfortunately, because this is such a hot topic in tech, and it "verifies" (with purely anecdotal evidence) many people's biases on the issue, people aren't even pointing this out.
I'm calling BS. Trunk is looking for an excuse to explain why her failures aren't her fault (Biology). Instead of writing a meaningful postmortem on how difficult entrepreneurship can be, we get this tripe that's supposed to apply to all (or most) women. Nevermind that there are women in a variety of incredibly demanding professions with children.
Beyond that, I really don't get this notion that you have to be in your children's faces every moment of the day in order for them to be well-adjusted. There's a huge difference between parenting/discipline and hovering/coddling.
Exactly. Working smarter/slower at first, and focusing on a well thought out minimal viable product, then scaling up makes more sense than working insane hours to bang out something fast then burn out.
I figure I have about 60-80 good hours of applied, useful thought a week (not all of which is spent on work related items).
I'm a 29 year old start-up founder in Tokyo, I'm also carrying my first child.
I don't know all of the stats regarding women and start-ups and to be honest, I don't care. I have learned that in order to be successful in anything-- sacrifice, hard work, knowing your stuff and the right people goes a long way and opens up a lot of opportunities, especially for Americans or start-ups in the US. The amount of support I receive being pregnant and founding a start-up is unbelievable, and I'm and American in Japan.
Penelope is known for writing articles like these, which do more harm than good in my humble opinion.
If you want to start a company, male or female, recognize that it won't be easy, be prepared to work harder than anyone else and dismiss the naysayers.
There are still questions about nature vs nurture. There are lots of social pressures to be a certain kind of woman, a certain kind of mom, etc. I'm not sure any of her examples prove that things are biologically this way, just that they are. I wish she would just ask the questions, and not answer them. Why aren't men full partners in parenting? Who's fault is that? Why aren't young women encouraged to take on greater risks in their lives? Is it really true that you can only have a successful start-up if you surround yourself with exploitable young men who will work long hours for a minimal payoff?
1. If by "startup" you mean tech startups as opposed to bricks and mortar businesses, there are fewer women programmers around to front tech startups. The law of averages is at work there, but I don't think it accounts for the whole disparity.
2. The VC model specific to tech startups is not what you'd call kid friendly. Please note that we are discussing this issue at Y Combinator. Submitting your startup to YC requires that you be willing to move to the Valley for three months. This is incredibly difficult if you have kids; if you are primary custodial parent, it is virtually impossible.
3. When women do run tech startups, they are not necessarily granted the credibility or profile. Penelope Trunk's article appears on Techcrunch. Ravelry has 850,000 members. It's been covered exactly once by TC, when it rolled into beta, with the line "If you’re a knitter, join the waiting list immediately. Everyone else, nothing to see here." Thanks, Michael.
All of that said, it is being done - just not necessarily according to the popular startup formula Penelope herself followed for Brazen Careerist.
"Running a startup" and "being in tech" are very different things. It's totally possible to work in tech without running a startup, so if her thesis is correct you'd expect women engineers to be equally represented in medium to large tech companies and under-represented at startups. Instead, they are vanishingly rare at both.
So I don't buy it. One datapoint does not yield a conclusion.
One thing I find interesting is that with the ever increasing ability to telecommute and work from home, many very talented women are able to stay employed and have kids at the same time. Employment is there if you can think and work "outside the box".
Example: My father is an attorney who started hiring skilled female lawyers with young children to handle a few hours of legal calls a day from home (the business design was phone-based legal services). The structure meant these women could work reduced hours from their own homes while taking care of their kids. Best of all they earned some income while not letting their skills go to waste.
There are so many creative ways to find/create employment for those willing to think beyond traditional work structure parameters.
I think children and the whole biological clock thing are a huge factor in this (and in the low percentage of women in any job that has crazy long hours, like law or medicine). But I also believe that the effect is both more subtle and far-reaching than is generally appreciated.
There are studies that show that people from a racist culture who believe "racism is wrong" will still tend to believe secondary and tertiary things that are basically racist but aren't directly about skin color per se -- like conversations I have had with people who say they would vote for or hire a black person if they were articulate enough and claim it is not racist, it is just that most blacks aren't educated/articulate enough. My reply to that is "If articulation were the issue, then George W Bush should have never been elected president. He is infamous for butchering the English language." Of course, he's white and male and went to the right schools and came from the right family. It makes people very uncomfortable to point out the flaw in their logic and point out that this is a social form of "Jim Crow Law".
So, basically, I think there is kind of a female version of social "Jim Crow Law" going on: Even women who don't specifically want to have kids may still make choices that are rooted in the goal of having mom available to the kids. Or may be discouraged by subtle social things that are rooted in those assumptions. People who make such assumptions usually don't even realize they are making them. So it gets hard to root out.
Let us say that the writer actually believes that every single assumption (and oh, there's so many you will lose count) in this article is true (they are not) and it is not just flamebait/linkbait (it most certainly is).
Even so, surely she believes in exceptions. Surely, she does not think that every woman in the world is exactly like her? Why the $$$$ would she advise other people who run startups to "stick with..men in their 20s".
Running the company has been absolute hell. Not that I didn’t know it would be hell. It’s my third startup. Each has had its own hell before we were solidly funded, but this one was so bad that my electricity was turned off, and I really thought I was going to die from stress.
Male or female, babies or not... maybe she's just in the wrong line of work? I've been the first tech hire at 3 startups, and I'm kind of undecided as to how much I actually like programming, but they were all kind of fun. There were a few stressful moments, but I wouldn't describe any of the experience as "hell," nor did we ever get our electricity shut off.
I mean, if it's always hell and you're on the brink of disaster, why would you bother doing it again... 3 times?
There was a time when I never wanted to work in tech because of what my parents went through. How fun could working for 12 hours a day, 6-7 days a week be? Not all that fun. Now, I work in tech. I guess I was wrong.
I was a toys'r'us kid. I didn't ever want to grow up. When I hit 27, I changed my mind. I guess I was wrong.
Today, I never want to have kids. But I've felt this with many things - many more than I mention here, most of which I've likely long forgotten. Instead, I tell my girlfriend that I don't think I want to have kids, but can't promise anything. Previous experience with the term proves it a rather dubious conclusion. Afterall, never is a long time.
[+] [-] cletus|15 years ago|reply
Several years ago I read an article that analyzed the work preferences of the genders. It demonstrably showed that:
- Men are more likely to do riskier jobs;
- Men are more likely to travel further to work (including internationally);
- Women tend to choose that are closer to home.
Basically it came down to risk-aversion. Women are, on the whole, more averse to risk than men.
A startup, compared to any salaried job, is far riskier. You can work for years on substandard pay and much longer hours and end up nothing. Of course you could also end up a millionaire (or even a billionaire).
Obviously children will be a factor for some (both men and women but more women than men, on the whole) and you can argue that the risk aversion is a product of the child factor but I think you see these same traits in women who are childless (so you then have to stretch the child factor to women who may one day have children, which applies to pretty much any women under 40 so is really a non-argument).
Tech Crunch had a post about this a few months ago. The tech press wants to write stories about women entrepreneurs. Companies and business schools have diversity policies the result of which is that the entrance requirement for women are generally lower than their male counterparts.
Equality isn't the same thing as being identical. If less than 50% of entrepreneurs or programmers are women is not a failure of equal opportunity. Nowadays there aren't any barriers preventing women from taking these paths (quite the opposite, actually). It's simply that less women choose these routes.
[+] [-] mklg1266|15 years ago|reply
Begging the question. As you point out, there are no laws or physical barriers preventing women in the US from doing just about anything, so their heavy relative underrepresentation means by definition they're choosing not to. The question is: why not? Choices aren't made in a vacuum. What is it about our culture and society that has led to the percentage of women in tech/computing to drop pretty much consistently since the field was invented while their numbers increase in many other formerly all-male professions?
You posit that women are observed to be more risk-averse, and that this explains why they avoid founding startups. Leaving aside whether this is true, I repeat my question: why?
(Tangentially, as I think someone else pointed out, the "women are biologically risk-averse" trope can only explain why women "choose" to not found startups, not why they "choose" to not work as a dev at a big tech company, for example, where the risk level is close to nil. Have you looked at the health benefits/maternity leave/termination policies at places like IBM or Microsoft?)
Everyone loves to triangulate complex evolutionary explanations to this kind of question, but a cultural argument is even simpler to make: women get paid less, are taken less seriously, are subject to glass ceilings, harassment, discrimination, have a higher probability of being raped, etc etc, every single day. Moreover, women are explicitly told from an early age not to dress too provocatively, never leave a drink unattended, never ever ever walk home alone at night. . .and that's leaving aside the more subtle cultural pressures that discourage them from the sciences. Women are at higher "risk" than men just by virtue of their gender, and they're reminded of this, with an implicit or explicit injunction to be careful, all the damned time. That might serve as a reasonable explanation for why they'd be more risk-averse, but is unfortunate in that it can't be shrugged aside with a trite evolutionary explanation.
Just because there are no laws preventing women from doing something does not mean that the playing field is equal.
[+] [-] InfinityX0|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jdp23|15 years ago|reply
in actuality women have been starting up companies at twice the rate of men for the last several years http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870468860457512...
[+] [-] shareme|15 years ago|reply
The difference as in other professions is the unfair and unjust burden women face in having a family as Men of the world are not yet up to the task of full sharing of child rearing duties.
Has very little to do with the want..cost of the want however different story
[+] [-] edw519|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] barredo|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mkramlich|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Watermelon|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] timcederman|15 years ago|reply
http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2009/06/17/whats-the-connectio...
[+] [-] gcheong|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] davidj|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _delirium|15 years ago|reply
And it's not really a new one: the "women do more/less of X because they want to have a family" argument is written about all the time. It vies with "inherent biological differences" and "discrimination" for the most-frequently-suggested explanation for gender differences in any field. You can get dozens of entire books on it.
It's also somewhat at odds with the (admittedly spotty) research that's been done in the area. For example, one in-depth series of case studies found that a large proportion of women who opted out of work to raise a family did so largely because they wanted out of the work, rather than because they wanted to raise a family and weren't able to do the work at the same time: quitting to raise a family was the plan B that they turned to when plan A (have a career) turned out to suck for various reasons: http://www.amazon.com/Opting-Out-Women-Really-Careers/dp/052...
On the other hand, it's perfectly fine for people to write personal blog posts about their own experiences. I think I'm mostly objecting to the attempt to generalize it based on one example; a "why I quit my startup to raise a family" post would've been fine.
[+] [-] ewjordan|15 years ago|reply
IMO the main reason this is getting attention is that it's a woman and she's not arguing the "discrimination" line. That's fine and all, but at this point it just seems like fanning the flames rather than adding anything new to the conversation.
Really, most of this whole debate is a polarization issue: the only people that care very much about this are at the fringes, either arguing the "men are pigs" position or getting really pissed off about people arguing the same. I think there's probably a balance between "discrimination" and "inherent biological differences" that conspire to turn women off from programming altogether, but each side is working so hard to shut the other side down completely that we don't see any balanced views coming out of this debate.
[+] [-] mklg1266|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] projectileboy|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jacquesm|15 years ago|reply
It's the perfect tool to have a company and be around the house all day long (or as long as you want to be), I'm not exactly female but I would have found it very hard to decide for children if I had been a person with a 9 to 5 job.
If you and your spouse can work together on a start-up (not always the best for everybody, but there are definitely cases were it worked very well and plenty were it worked good enough) then you can find some pretty good splits between raising children and running a company.
Things like web design and programming go very well with working from home and raising kids, I see it as a win for everybody.
If your idea of a start-up is to have lots of employees, a huge office and turnover in the millions then that's another case entirely, but on a lesser scale it is perfectly doable.
[+] [-] frossie|15 years ago|reply
The great thing about software today is how much you can do on a small scale. If her theory about commitment was correct, you would have a bunch of women who had started small side projects and then said "oh this has really taken off and I don't want to work 100 hours a week so I want to sell it". Where are they then?
I am pretty convinced that the answer is a lot simpler and is simply related to the number of women who code in the first place.
[+] [-] araneae|15 years ago|reply
Theoretically if you're a man with a wife with a job, you can do the same thing... except there are a lot fewer wives that are willing to do that than husbands.
[+] [-] cperciva|15 years ago|reply
I'm not sure that I believe her arguments about men, though:
For men it’s different. We all know that men do not search all over town finding the perfect ballet teacher. Men are more likely to settle when it comes to raising kids. The kids are fine. Men are more likely than women to think they themselves are doing a good job parenting. This makes sense from an evolutionary perspective. Men have to trust that the kids will be okay so that they can leave and go get food or make more kids.
It seems to me that she's ignoring the most important factor: Men have more time to do a startup before having children because men are usually older than their wives. The average age difference is 2 years, but I wouldn't be surprised if the gap increases with education and income.
(Then again, maybe this is just wishful thinking from a single 29 year old who still hopes to get married and have 2.5 children some day.)
[+] [-] zavulon|15 years ago|reply
The difference is though, we as men can (hopefully) keep spending 80 hour weeks on work now, get insanely rich by 35, meet a woman of our dreams at 40, get married at 45, and have kids at 50. Women don't have that option.
[+] [-] ahoyhere|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] arithmetic|15 years ago|reply
1) I'm tired of articles like these which have little to no research backing up their claims on why there are so few women doing startups. Penelope isn't making a sweeping generalization in the article, but she might as well make a generalization here - the effect is quite the same.
2) I'm also tired of the set of women I refer to as "the angry feminists" who are easily insulted everytime someone (especially a male author/speaker) points out that there are so few women in tech or that women lack qualities X and Y to do a startup. To all the women of the afore-mentioned category, you're wasting your time. An ounce of action is better than a ton of theories.
3) And last, I honestly don't know why there are so few women in tech. I don't have theories. All I know is that there ARE few women in tech (and fewer doing startups). I don't think we are all risk-averse. Sure, some of us may not like taking chances, but I'm pretty sure it's not every one of us.
I've been involved in writing software all my adult life. I'd like to do a startup one day. It's a tough world out there if you're doing anything on your own, irrespective of your gender. So stop analyzing and start doing.
[+] [-] untamedmedley|15 years ago|reply
She is trying to blame her failure on being a woman.
She's started several startups, and each time has failed to create anything that matched her original entrepreneurial dreams. Unfortunately, because this is such a hot topic in tech, and it "verifies" (with purely anecdotal evidence) many people's biases on the issue, people aren't even pointing this out.
I'm calling BS. Trunk is looking for an excuse to explain why her failures aren't her fault (Biology). Instead of writing a meaningful postmortem on how difficult entrepreneurship can be, we get this tripe that's supposed to apply to all (or most) women. Nevermind that there are women in a variety of incredibly demanding professions with children.
Beyond that, I really don't get this notion that you have to be in your children's faces every moment of the day in order for them to be well-adjusted. There's a huge difference between parenting/discipline and hovering/coddling.
[+] [-] patio11|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zdw|15 years ago|reply
I figure I have about 60-80 good hours of applied, useful thought a week (not all of which is spent on work related items).
[+] [-] Swoopey|15 years ago|reply
I don't know all of the stats regarding women and start-ups and to be honest, I don't care. I have learned that in order to be successful in anything-- sacrifice, hard work, knowing your stuff and the right people goes a long way and opens up a lot of opportunities, especially for Americans or start-ups in the US. The amount of support I receive being pregnant and founding a start-up is unbelievable, and I'm and American in Japan.
Penelope is known for writing articles like these, which do more harm than good in my humble opinion.
If you want to start a company, male or female, recognize that it won't be easy, be prepared to work harder than anyone else and dismiss the naysayers.
[+] [-] dgabriel|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SabrinaDent|15 years ago|reply
1. If by "startup" you mean tech startups as opposed to bricks and mortar businesses, there are fewer women programmers around to front tech startups. The law of averages is at work there, but I don't think it accounts for the whole disparity.
2. The VC model specific to tech startups is not what you'd call kid friendly. Please note that we are discussing this issue at Y Combinator. Submitting your startup to YC requires that you be willing to move to the Valley for three months. This is incredibly difficult if you have kids; if you are primary custodial parent, it is virtually impossible.
3. When women do run tech startups, they are not necessarily granted the credibility or profile. Penelope Trunk's article appears on Techcrunch. Ravelry has 850,000 members. It's been covered exactly once by TC, when it rolled into beta, with the line "If you’re a knitter, join the waiting list immediately. Everyone else, nothing to see here." Thanks, Michael.
All of that said, it is being done - just not necessarily according to the popular startup formula Penelope herself followed for Brazen Careerist.
[+] [-] seldo|15 years ago|reply
So I don't buy it. One datapoint does not yield a conclusion.
[+] [-] MrFlibble|15 years ago|reply
Example: My father is an attorney who started hiring skilled female lawyers with young children to handle a few hours of legal calls a day from home (the business design was phone-based legal services). The structure meant these women could work reduced hours from their own homes while taking care of their kids. Best of all they earned some income while not letting their skills go to waste.
There are so many creative ways to find/create employment for those willing to think beyond traditional work structure parameters.
[+] [-] Mz|15 years ago|reply
There are studies that show that people from a racist culture who believe "racism is wrong" will still tend to believe secondary and tertiary things that are basically racist but aren't directly about skin color per se -- like conversations I have had with people who say they would vote for or hire a black person if they were articulate enough and claim it is not racist, it is just that most blacks aren't educated/articulate enough. My reply to that is "If articulation were the issue, then George W Bush should have never been elected president. He is infamous for butchering the English language." Of course, he's white and male and went to the right schools and came from the right family. It makes people very uncomfortable to point out the flaw in their logic and point out that this is a social form of "Jim Crow Law".
So, basically, I think there is kind of a female version of social "Jim Crow Law" going on: Even women who don't specifically want to have kids may still make choices that are rooted in the goal of having mom available to the kids. Or may be discouraged by subtle social things that are rooted in those assumptions. People who make such assumptions usually don't even realize they are making them. So it gets hard to root out.
My 2 cents.
[+] [-] petercooper|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joelmichael|15 years ago|reply
Men Don't Want To Have Children Because They'd Rather Run Startups
[+] [-] jscore|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ajju|15 years ago|reply
Even so, surely she believes in exceptions. Surely, she does not think that every woman in the world is exactly like her? Why the $$$$ would she advise other people who run startups to "stick with..men in their 20s".
What a shameful way to get attention!
[+] [-] maxawaytoolong|15 years ago|reply
Male or female, babies or not... maybe she's just in the wrong line of work? I've been the first tech hire at 3 startups, and I'm kind of undecided as to how much I actually like programming, but they were all kind of fun. There were a few stressful moments, but I wouldn't describe any of the experience as "hell," nor did we ever get our electricity shut off.
I mean, if it's always hell and you're on the brink of disaster, why would you bother doing it again... 3 times?
[+] [-] sbov|15 years ago|reply
There was a time when I never wanted to work in tech because of what my parents went through. How fun could working for 12 hours a day, 6-7 days a week be? Not all that fun. Now, I work in tech. I guess I was wrong.
I was a toys'r'us kid. I didn't ever want to grow up. When I hit 27, I changed my mind. I guess I was wrong.
Today, I never want to have kids. But I've felt this with many things - many more than I mention here, most of which I've likely long forgotten. Instead, I tell my girlfriend that I don't think I want to have kids, but can't promise anything. Previous experience with the term proves it a rather dubious conclusion. Afterall, never is a long time.