Obviously you're focusing on journalists now, but there are other groups of content creators who might be into your product; I see cartoonists and photographers are mentioned in the article. I wonder whether this model would be useful to young academics, too - especially those who are moving to careers outside of academia but might still like to conduct and share research. Publishing in academic journals is (supposed to be) a way to get your research out there, and peer review does matter. But academic journals don't pay their authors, and often have very limited audiences. It seems like Beacon could help solve those problems. Maybe another interested population for you in the future!
I think this makes some great points, without casting any blame. The article offers a very diplomatic perspective on some of the challenges facing female founders. I hope the comments here don't immediately become trolly, as they seem to do any time an article deals with women in tech at all.
I agree. There are lots of good reasons to do a PhD, not all of them job-related, but getting outside of academia quickly afterwards can save a lot of grief and stress.
It looks like the author has added a short piece explaining why she didn't cover women. I'm not really sure why she wouldn't have just included the one or two relevant sentences here in her original article.
I'd love to hear whether there are equivalent trends among women in the field, or what the challenges of dressing to be taken seriously as a woman in the valley are.
From a Canadian perspective, this is really interesting. The article makes great points about how much more advantageous learning second languages other than French could be (it mentions Arabic, Japanese, etc.), which I find pretty convincing. In Canada, though, having French language skills can be a huge advantage for anyone who wants a government job, or to teach, or to enter politics. French might not be useful or important in America, but it can be an asset in Canada.
This article assumes that there's nothing affecting or constraining people's career choices besides interest in a particular field. It's not that women choose careers that pay less - it's that careers dominated by women are frequently perceived to be less valuable to society and are therefore paid at a lower rate. Careers in which men historically dominated, but which later become "female professions", pay less when done by women. "Women make less remunerative life choices" seems like a fairly ignorant way to explain wage disparity.
I think most academic writing would benefit from more attention to readability. Writing about any kind of research in a more accessible, more readable way should really be part of the writing process no matter what. If you've done awesome research, but communicate about it ineffectively, you're doing a disservice to your own work. I think ideally, academic writing should be readable and interesting but still sophisticated and complex.
This seems like a really excellent move. Even if I didn't need to or plan to use the childcare service, knowing that a conference offered it would still be awesome.