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Comment by ashedryden | Hacker News Reader

As a woman (and someone who is friends with the Brazen peeps) this is highly insulting. It assumes that all women want to have children, that men are mostly absent/dismissive in their children's lives (if they have them), and insinuates that women just aren't biologically fit to run a company. I know Penelope has kind of made a name for herself in saying things that shock people, so I wouldn't doubt that this is in the same vein. I run a company, work ridiculous hours, and the other devs on my team are male. I don't think any of us puts it fewer hours or energy based on the number of ovaries each has.

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Apparently it only took 16 minutes for the take-offense-out-of-context strawman to rear its ugly head. Did you even read beyond the headline?

The author doesn't say "all women" to the point that a single counterexample disproves the hypothesis. Not only does the auther qualify statements such as "fewer women" but any such analysis is a statistical study of a group. It says something about a group and similar groups but nothing about a specific individual (in a definitive non-probabilistic sense at least).

It's a bit like arguing that the research into the ill-health effects of smoking are nonsense because your Uncle Jack smoked 3 packs a day for 80 years and died at age 95 when hit by a bus (ie not lung cancer).

The offense taken at this article is intentionally undertaken to change the norm, to encourage men to take more responsibility for their children and for women to take more responsibility in society at large.

The offense is not at the statement of fact, the offense is that the fact is stated as if it were the good and proper order of things. The good and proper order of things is equality.

Now, you're free to disagree, but don't misunderstand us.

It's a bit like arguing that the research into the ill-health effects of smoking are nonsense because your Uncle Jack smoked 3 packs a day for 80 years and died at age 95 when hit by a bus

Except she does not cite one bit of research to back up her claims.

What do you call research without data? Assumptions.

The article says "And I’m not even going to go into the idea of women having a startup with young kids. It is absolutely untenable. The women I know who do this have lost their companies or their marriages or both. And there is no woman running a startup with young kids, who, behind closed doors, would recommend this life to anyone." How much more contet do you want?

It assumes that all women want to have children

Headlines omit qualifiers. If you read the headline as "Fewer women than men want to run startups because many of them would rather have children", I think it's entirely accurate. Sure, there are women who don't want children, just like there are men who want nothing more than to be stay-at-home dads -- but they're the exception, not the rule.

I know tons of successful women who run businesses who are fine without having children; I also know quite a few who have children and are still able to run a business.

This whole argument goes back to the beginning of the feminist movement and people not being willing to hire women because they should be making some man sandwiches and popping out babies.

The trend is leaning towards more women having fewer children, if they are having them at all (http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8...).

Just like almost everyone on HN, you are a statistical anomaly.

(This is nothing to do with you being a woman - that just increases the factor by an order of magnitude or two.)

Even the people you know are probably outliers. So you have to be a bit careful relying on your experience and instead look at broader demographic trends.

Nearly all of the people I know well have no TV. Should I assume that TV is hugely unpopular with everyone?

You'll get fewer downvotes if you respond to the article's specific claims that you have a problem with, using data from studies (and absolutely no anecdotes).

Well, that headline is designed to get eyeballs.

It should have been headlined "Opinion: ...", as it's not like the article is full of research, etc.

This also assumes that having children means one or the other parent's job is to stay at home with them, which hasn't been true for a number of years because of the amount of money needed to sustain a family and the fact that women no longer need to give up their careers to have children.

> Headlines omit qualifiers.

It wasn't just the headline. Example: "even the most child-oriented men are not as child-oriented as their wives." This line isn't merely lacking in qualifiers, it explicitly denies exceptions, saying that even outliers fit the stereotype.

(I happen to be one of the exceptions.)

I run a company, work ridiculous hours, and the other devs on my team are male. I don't think any of us puts it fewer hours or energy based on the number of ovaries each has.

All of which is completely irrelevant.

It's great that you ended up in tech, nobody is suggesting you're in any way less suited to perform well than men are (at least not in any reasonable discussion).

They're simply suggesting reasons why other women don't choose the field; clearly there are some causes for this phenomenon, and they've got to be pretty strong given the overwhelming disparity.

It assumes that all women want to have children, that men are mostly absent/dismissive in their children's lives (if they have them),

No, it assumes that many women want to have children, and tend to take greater roles in their lives if and when they do so. Do you really disagree with that? I know it's anecdotal, but both these things hold true for such a vast majority of the people that I know personally that I'd have trouble believing it wasn't the case, not to mention the overwhelming biological imperatives in play here.

and insinuates that women just aren't biologically fit to run a company.

That's a radical interpretation of the text; the closest thing that she said to that was that women with children have a difficult time putting in the insane hours that a venture-backed startup requires.

FWIW, despite my apparent defense, I don't think that this article really pins down a significant reason we don't see more women running tech startups - the sad fact is, most women never get interested in programming in the first place, and that happens way before they're thinking about having children or what sort of career might go well with that goal.

Evolutionary pressure in our society will tend toward women that have children, not women who don't have children.

If women all run business, go to wars, and the like. All of which implies that women won't have time to have children because it take 9 months to make a baby as well the maternity leave that come with it. It will be a population disaster if that were ever to happen. Pretty soon, you won't have a self-sustaining population.

In time, women like you will be the exception or already is an exception. Sad, but true.

Not necessarily. Birthrates in developed countries where resources are plentiful and infant mortality rates are low tend downward, not upward. Our species has adopted the strategy that it is better to put more resources into fewer offspring than the shot-gunning approach. We only need to maintain replacement levels or slightly above to be self-sustaining.

Apart from isolated examples in certain countries I don't think the world as a whole has much to worry about in maintaining replacement levels.

6,873,900,000 and counting... (continuous growth since the Black Death around the year 1400)

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

And for every woman like you there are 10 more women who are stay-at-home mom's and/or just like Penelope's characterization. The exceptional cases do not invalidate the general rule.

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