missizii

We are a “low screen” homeschooling family. We have a babysitting phone for my daughters to take to babysitting jobs and a landline. At our local pool in the summer, my kids meet neighborhood kids, exchange numbers, but my kids say, “it’s a landline, no texting.” The response: “You just have a landline?!? You can’t text?!?” in a tone of disgust. Every time. Fortunately, we have a community of homeschooling & religious community friends who are raising their kids similarly. But every time a kid’s friend gets a cellphone, texting becomes the medium of socialization, and they drop us. My kids will be the 1% of their generation who can talk on the phone.

How are families coping? In my friend group:

- Homeschooling at-home parents take on a side hustle (teach piano lessons, mobile notary, dog sitting)

- Buy a side of beef

- Buy beans in bulk (25# boxes)

- Grow a small garden for salad greens and herbs

- Don’t eat out

- No extracurriculars that cost money

- Use the library whenever possible

- Vacations are now camping with 2nd hand gear

- In general, buy used. As a result, prices in 2nd hand market are also inflated.

Engaging with small children is an actual skill set. - Play dates have been mentioned, and those are great ideas. - Go for a walk or a hike. Start small, take a water bottle. See if you can go longer next time. Have a theme: can we find a toad, shelf fungus, beetle, duck…? - Take advantage of library story time, check all local libraries - Join the local pool, there is nothing that will cheer up a grumpy 4 year old like swimming, and they sleep well afterward - Bath time can be any time and an hour long if they are having fun - Read picture books from the library and take them back when you’re tired of them - Give them simple tasks like tearing lettuce for dinner, folding wash cloths and towels, putting away books or toys when you’re done with them. 4 year olds are eager to help because that makes them feel big. - Ride the bus for a loop and talk about what you see - Do a collaborative drawing (look at artful parent website) - Learn a song with motions. Invent new words and motions for it. - Playdough - Watercolors - Kick and throw balls - Enormous cardboard box with markers and dollar store stickers - Puzzles - Puppets (read the bio of Mr. Rogers for inspiration) - Silly music dance party

Hopefully you will start a virtuous cycle of positive and fun interactions, so you aren’t so fatigued by the end of the day. In 2011, I left my software engineering career to be a stay at home, homeschooling mom to (now) 4 kids. I’m old too.

We are big fans of Bedtime Math: https://bedtimemath.org/

1. Tech has small percentage of women. The ridiculous under representation of female coders is widely recognized as a problem and something that should be fixed. There are programs for recruiting women into CS Majors. But the imbalance will remain when women have babies and are given only the choices of the third shift or leaving their careers. 2. Women who choose breastfeeding, which can be 3-4 hours a day total, are then in place to be the primary infant caregivers.

Part time work for developers would also help women who don’t want to work full time when they have small children. If I had a part time option when my children were small, I would have embraced it. My career was thriving, but there was no “step back” option for me. If you want more women in tech, recognize that the first shift of daycare & school prep, the second shift of work, and the third shift of cooking, cleaning, and caring, is exhausting and unpleasant, even when both parents try to share the burden.

“Sure, I may have been a failure in classical music”

This breaks my heart, and it’s exactly how I felt for 15 years. Being a violin failure, when I loved violin more than anything, was so painful. But when it comes to things like playing violin, we have the power to decide for ourselves what success and failure are. Success might be practicing five hours a week and mastering four new pieces a year and enjoying the transcendent beauty of playing violin.

I left the pre-professional violinist track and ended up with an MS in CS. Now I’m a homeschooling mother teaching her kids to play violin and piano, among other things.

Our culture is obsessively utilitarian when it comes to music and sports. Playing music, playing sports is anything but playful, and it is such a shame.

I am a woman and do NOT want to be (or viewed as) a token diversity hire. It affects my job because it means I get less interesting work, in practical reality. Diversity programs mean that equally & highly qualified women operate under the cloud of an assumed diversity hire, and are thus, viewed as less-competent.

I'm a homeschooling SAHM (was a software engineer for 6 years, have a MS in CS) expecting our 4 child, born in 1982. This is not surprising to me, I know many women choosing being at home over a lucrative & promising career. Both my parents are MDs, and I was raised by nannies. Here's the thing about nannies - you don't know a situation is really bad until it's too late. Also, the second shift is a very real, exhausting phenomenon. Lots of smart women with smart early wave feminist moms have looked at our own childhoods and said, "I'd rather be significantly poorer and spend the time with my kids. I missed my mom when I was a kid and it hurt. I don't want the stress of working a full day followed afterschool pickup followed by homework and extracurriculars followed by dinner and cleaning." Not shockingly, I married a guy who agrees with me on this.

I started coding as a teenager, ended up with a Masters in CS. Had a great career as a software engineer mostly in start-ups and companies with a start-up-like culture, until I was 28, when we moved for my husband's job. Where we live now, almost all the jobs are in banking. I became pregnant with my first child a few months after the move, and now I am a housewife, homeschooling my Kindergartener, and expecting our fourth child. I do miss coding, and I have lots of ideas for open source educational software projects, but no time/energy to pursue it currently. I hope when my children are a bit older to get back into tech, mostly via open source projects and hackathons, since I hope we will be homeschooling long term. I miss being a software engineer, but my financial software stint taught me that corporate culture is hugely important to whether I enjoy my job and can do it well. I love being home with my children and teaching them, going to the park with them on a nice Tuesday at 10am has yet to lose its novelty and pleasure.

I still read HN because I am still deeply interested in coding & tech culture. It's been a strong interest for over 20 years, I don't think it will go away.

I'm a white woman who has been going to naturallycurly.com for at least 5 years. Naturally curly hair is different to cut & style than straight hair, and there are surprisingly few stylists who cut curly hair well. I don't see how race plays into it other than I've never met a black woman with naturally straight hair. The beauty market is huge, and naturallycurly is a great resource for the many women currently underserved because conventional beauty standards dictate straight or wavy hair.

I would like to know how you handle this, because I am expecting my first child in July (missizii@yahoo.com). I am fortunate that my husband can support our family and if I wanted to, I would never have to work outside the home again. But I don't want to completely give up the personal satisfaction of building interesting software that is used by lots of people. I live in a low-tech area, and there is no such thing as a part-time software engineering position. My current plan is to use a half-day Montessori preschool starting at age 2 and use that time to work on an android application (I'm a jack-of-all-trades, but I started my career in Java). Is a half-day preschool an option for you?

As someone who lives in an area where forced busing still occurs, the result is actually quite different. The middle class students are sent to private schools, charter schools, homeschooled, or the families move away altogether. If they go to the public schools, they can't learn because of the disruptive students who are bused in. The parents resist all efforts to raise the property tax base because their children don't attend public schools anymore, and so why should they pay for them? And so the schools lose even more money.

I also have super curly hair. I only use conditioner, no shampoo unless my scalp needs extra cleaning, which is very rarely. And I use hair products like gel and spray. Conditioner combed through my hair and then rinsed out removes all hair products. Check out the DevaCurl starter kit - it has "NoPoo" shampoo, which is shampoo without harsh sulfates, conditioner, gel, and spray. Their products are great for curly hair.

And we wonder why there aren't more women in tech.

Are you arguing that because men are, on average, physically stronger than women, it implies that they are smarter or more analytical than women?

That's like arguing that because women have, on average, smaller feet than men, they are smarter or more analytical than men.

Women are more risk averse than men. It's a well-known evolutionary strategy for men to choose high-risk/high-reward pursuits.

Also, you completely ignored my point about these careers being suited to physically extremely strong people, which are disproportionately men (due to biological differences).

Women should be programmers because they are as mentally capable as men, and they can handle the minimal physical requirements. If a woman is just as strong as a male lumberjack/fisherman/etc, and perfectly fine with the risk, then she should be able to do that job as well.

(More than 500,000 people are treated in the US for ladder-related injuries.)

I'm not a fan of the male-stereotyping in the article. At best, it's unproductive, at worst, it insults men and so they stop listening.

A lot of the responses here on HN though demonstrate exactly why many women leave software engineering. Read these responses and ask if you like your mother, wife, girlfriend, or daughter working with people who have these attitudes. In an all-male group, the level of misogyny is camouflaged because there are no women to talk about. When there's a woman around, it's exposed, because she is both a target of any misogyny PLUS all the discussion about the drama created by it. Most women cope by becoming "one of the guys" and laughing along when someone makes a sexist remark. The stereotype of the un-made-up geeky female hacker exists because a lot of women notice the difference in how they're treated when they wear a skirt, heels, nice hair, and make-up, as opposed to jeans, sneakers, ponytail. It's a lot easier to dress sloppy and not be made a target.

Another problem is that a significant amount of workplace happiness derives from having friends at work. It's a lot harder to make friends when you're the only woman and you occasionally wonder, "does he really view me as a friend? or is he flirting? that sounded like flirting." Or consider networking - the best way to advance your career. How do geek guys network? It's not usually golf. Networking with geeky guys usually involves late nights gaming, coding, drinking beer (in my experience). I'm not comfortable going to my single coworkers house to play video games and drink beer until midnight, or staying at work coding with a couple coworkers after everyone else has gone home and the secret mini-fridge in the server room has been opened. It could lead to a bad situation with lots of misunderstanding that could ruin a career. Best to just avoid it.

If it wasn't a wide-spread problem, then why does every single woman in the industry feel like it's something she has had to deal with personally? I've been in the industry 5 years and I'm considering leaving because I feel my gender is holding me back. I'm smart and hard working and I can do really well in a field where being a woman isn't going to hurt my career.

All the other professions are high-risk and require significant physical strength. Men are generally more comfortable with high-risk, high-reward jobs, and have a physical strength advantage over women.

Computer Science is not high-risk and does not require significant physical strength.

I second (or third) the recommendations of seeing a psychologist and upping your level of physical activity. Try to find a psychologist who isn't a pill-pusher. I also recommend the books "Feeling Good" by David Burns and "The Highly Sensitive Person" by Elaine Aron. One thing that helps me figure out if I'm ok with where I am and what I have is imagining that I'll lose it tomorrow (not in a bad way). If I'm tired of where I live, I imagine I'm moving tomorrow, if I'm unsure about my job, I imagine it's my last day here. It helps me appreciate the good things about my situation. However, I'm definitely one of those people who doesn't appreciate what they have until it's gone.

You might find the book "The Highly Sensitive Person: How to Thrive When the World Overwhelms You" by Elaine Aron helpful. Shyness isn't the same as being highly sensitive, but sensitive people are often considered shy.

Violin, wanted to go pro when I was a teen.

I must agree with brlewis. Another way to look at it is Option 1: Spend 50% of your time honing your skills, gaining valuable experience Option 2: Spend 100% of your time honing your skills, gaining valuable experience Another thing to consider is how awesome it is to work with people who are as good as you (or better), love what they do, and have things to teach you. Even if option 2 pays less, take the cut and get the experience that will propel you into a higher pay bracket. BTW, none of the supremo hackers I've worked with have begrudged me time to play with some cool new tool - as long as I willing to share my knowledge.