8 ms·

Women Don't Want To Run Startups Because They'd Rather Have Children

97 points by razin 16y ago

cperciva 16y ago
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.)
- zavulon 16y ago
  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.
  - leftnode 16y ago
    Alternatively, I have a 6 month old and I'm only 26. I'm glad I had him early: being up late has allowed me to work on my startup and maintain a full time job. I'd love to be independently wealthy by 35. He'd be set up for life, and I would have plenty of time to spend with him and pursue other ventures. No way I'd want the burden of a child at age 50.
- ahoyhere 16y ago
  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.
ashedryden 16y ago
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.
- cperciva 16y ago
  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.
  - ashedryden 16y ago
    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&q=fewer+women+having+children http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&#3...).
    - notauser 16y ago
      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?
patio11 16y ago
This model of doing business is broken. It can be fixed.
- zdw 16y ago
  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).
  - mahmud 16y ago
    The slow start approach doesn't work well for novel, or large-scale fast growing businesses. The former case, one needs repeated iteration and trial and error to discover/create a new market. You will deviate several degrees from your original direction within the first 2-3 years. In the later case, you have no choice to grow "smart" if you have something viral. You don't choose your scale or the speed of your growth once a few people discover you. You will end up working insane hours just to keep the infrastructure alive. (this is strictly for software businesses, btw. but I can think of an instance of D.C. hole in the wall sandwitch joint that got reviewed on NPR. Nothing like a flesh-DoS, and you can't tell that guy he doesn't need to put in insane hours.)
cletus 16y ago
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.
- shareme 16y ago
  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
  - Groxx 16y ago
    Risk aversion makes sense from a biological standpoint, though. Males are expendable, thus must show off to get mating rights (because we don't live in a world where women are won (in most places)). As to the Modern World, men rarely take maternity leave. That's a long time to be away from a job, a large risk for the company, at a possibly highly inopportune moment. Risk.
timcederman 16y ago
I'll simply point out that this is Penelope Trunk, who previous wrote about how she had two abortions for her career. http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2009/06/17/whats-the-connection-between-abortions-and-careers/ http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2009/06/17/whats-the-connectio...
- gcheong 16y ago
  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.
- davidj 16y ago
  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.
jacquesm 16y ago
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.
- frossie 16y ago
  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.
- araneae 16y ago
  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.
edw519 16y ago
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.)
- barredo 16y ago
  We live in amazing times if a woman can have her 6th child at 46, I assuming both the mother and the child are completely healthy.
- Watermelon 16y ago
  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...
  - Jun8 16y ago
    I think you've got it wrong. I think the point he was trying top make is the time management aspect (as parents know, kids are a huge time sink, god bless'em). I've got only one, and he's making it extremely hard to put extra time on anything. So, actually having N kids is nothing to boast about, doing so while being able to do anything meaningful is.
    - Watermelon 16y ago
      I know a medical doctor who had 14 kids (oh, those catholics). And she still managed to practise medicine when she was not spreading her legs to launch another baby in this world. Sounds much more impressive than managing a baseball team, imho. The OP wants the HN crowd to assure him of what a special and unique snowflake his sister is, when she's merely doing something that is the norm in some parts of the world.
deleted 16y ago
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DevX101 16y ago
She raises some valid points. I'm in my late twenties, and I do want to have a family some day, but to be honest, it's not a burning issue for me right now. I feel fairly comfortable that 10 years from now I could find an attractive woman who I can share my life with. What I CANNOT feel comfortable with however, is still toiling away 10 years from now, still trying to get my first break. As men, we have a longer runway to start a family which certainly has an impact on the numbers of women in this endeavor.
ahoyhere 16y ago
I do wish women with a chip on their shoulders would stop getting all aggro about observations that are not prescriptions. You saying "that's not true" is just as globalizing as "this is true." There is just something about women and product businesses that's weird. I recently put on a conference about bootstrapping paying products only, and I looked for ages to find a single woman bootstrapper like myself. They can't be found. There are uncountable zillions of women freelancers, women running agencies, women coding, women designing, women writing, women coaching. There are way more women running tech startups that have VC funding than there are with bootstrapping. I can name 5 to 7 female founders with VC off the top of my head -- to my mind, they have better brand name recognition than male founders (the only men I can think of by name, I know personally). But, after days and days of searching and mining my (RL) social networks, I was able to identify only ONE single fellow bootstrapper (and she's "only" part of a 4-person team). And she's not from The Land of Opportunity, if you know what I mean. Outside of tech, there are lots of women who've gotten loans or other capital to make ands sell physical goods, of all the risky-ass things they could do. Or restaurants, shops and cafes. So, obviously there are many women who are not afraid of entrepreneurship and not really risk-averse. Selling specialty shoes or front-end web dev is much, much riskier than creating a paying digital product, and less remunerative than doing a startup with funding. (And most of those funded startups are "social long shots" -- not product businesses.) I don't have the answer, but there is something weird going on there. But I don't think it's an external thing. Nobody is keeping those other women down. That said, I'm a married woman in my mid-20s. I married when I was 24 and launched my product business right after. If I ever wanted to have kids (which I do not), I would definitely wait, because the "have it all" thing is definitely a myth. You end up either shortchanging your kids or your work, unless you're totally unstoppable (and who is?).
- geuis 16y ago
  I'd like you to talk to my friend Esther Flatto. She is working on a product called the Flip Slip. geuis.teses@gmail.com
- lizzy 16y ago
  There are way more women running tech startups that have VC funding than there are with bootstrapping. Really? I'm not so sure. Perhaps it is just hard to hear about the women that are bootstrapping tech companies. Companies that are being bootstrapped typically are pre-traction, and have not received the buzz in the tech media that comes with raising a funding round.
jscore 16y ago
Now, that's some serious linkpaid or commentbait. Surprised it wasn't written by MG Siegler.
_delirium 16y ago
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/0520244354 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 16y ago
  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.
fablednet 16y ago
On a pure headline level, this is more suited for The Onion than TechCrunch.
ajju 16y ago
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". What a shameful way to get attention!
dgabriel 16y ago
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?
ax0n 16y ago
This seems like much more of a cultural phenomenon than a biological one.
seldo 16y ago
"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.
mfukar 16y ago
Oh my, the extrapolation is making my brain shrink!
QuantumGood 16y ago
Hey, a child IS a startup...and you can't be risk averse to create one.
sbov 16y ago
I generally find the use of "never" interesting. 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.
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atari 16y ago
In other news, this is called the "biased sample" fallacy. 1. Sample S, which is biased, is taken from population P. 2. Conclusion C is drawn about Population P based on S. http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/biased-sample.html http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/biased-sample.html
dennisgorelik 16y ago
To see why women focus on children I'd recommend this article by the same author: http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2006/06/01/get-married-first-then-focus-on-career/ http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2006/06/01/get-married-first-t...
ashedryden 16y ago
Women did not evolve against risk taking and startups: http://restructure.wordpress.com/2010/10/04/women-did-not-evolve-against-risk-taking-and-tech-startups/ http://restructure.wordpress.com/2010/10/04/women-did-not-ev...
- dgabriel 16y ago
  This blog is fantastic. Thank you for sharing.
Mz 16y ago
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. My 2 cents.
SabrinaDent 16y ago
Couple of points: 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.
petercooper 16y ago
"Men Don't Want To Run Startups Because They'd Rather Watch Football"
- joelmichael 16y ago
  Watching football isn't a very good comparison with having children, let's try... Men Don't Want To Have Children Because They'd Rather Run Startups
sliverstorm 16y ago
> My startup is me and a bunch of twenty-something guys. And if you’re a woman launching a startup, my advice is to stick with this crowd. They never stop working because it’s so exciting to them: the learning curve is high, they can move anywhere, they can live on nothing, and they can keep wacky hours. Certainly, as a 20-something guy, that DOES sound pretty exciting, and I can't imagine any of my female friends going for it.
arithmetic 16y ago
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.
joshcrews 16y ago
I think children themselves _are_ startups. They require a ton of effort and long hours getting started, have a growth phase, and then start to pay returns and become more self-sufficient. In a sense, women are involved in startups when they choose to have kids. Background info: In the past year, I've started my family (first baby) and worked on several startups as a Rails developer (FYI, I'm a man).
MrFlibble 16y ago
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.
Swoopey 16y ago
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.
maxawaytoolong 16y ago
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?
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annajohnson 16y ago
Not this woman. Ever since I was young I wanted to build a big business (i.e. NOT a 'lifestyle' business) and also raise a family. I never, ever saw it as an 'either/or' decision and maybe that's why I'm doing both.
qeorge 16y ago
I'd love to hear the author say this to the women in my family with a straight face. - My mother and her best friend (also a woman) started a business last year (her 2nd), and she's looking at starting a third. - My stepmother founded/runs a non-profit (her 2nd or 3rd, not sure). - My sister declared she wanted to be a dean at age 18. 12 years and 3 degrees later, she's now a dean at American. - All 4 of my aunts run their own businesses, three have done several and the fourth started hers this week. One currently owns/runs one of the larger companies in Germany. Anecdotal evidence be damned!
untamedmedley 16y ago
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.
callmeed 16y ago
If there was an "education blogosphere", I wonder if they'd have a constant stream of articles trying explain why there are so few male elementary school teachers (14%).
_corbett 16y ago
it saddens me that such linkbait generalizations make it to the frontpage of HN it strikes me as insane that discussion on these issues centers around the mean (pun intended). being an entrepreneur one is a few sigma away already; we can't even see the average from here so why are we wasting time chatting about it?

97 points by razin 16y ago

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.)

zavulon 16y ago
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.
- leftnode 16y ago
  Alternatively, I have a 6 month old and I'm only 26. I'm glad I had him early: being up late has allowed me to work on my startup and maintain a full time job. I'd love to be independently wealthy by 35. He'd be set up for life, and I would have plenty of time to spend with him and pursue other ventures. No way I'd want the burden of a child at age 50.
ahoyhere 16y ago
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.

ashedryden 16y ago

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.

cperciva 16y ago
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.
- ashedryden 16y ago
  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&q=fewer+women+having+children http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&#3...).
  - notauser 16y ago
    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?

patio11 16y ago

This model of doing business is broken. It can be fixed.

zdw 16y ago
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).
- mahmud 16y ago
  The slow start approach doesn't work well for novel, or large-scale fast growing businesses. The former case, one needs repeated iteration and trial and error to discover/create a new market. You will deviate several degrees from your original direction within the first 2-3 years. In the later case, you have no choice to grow "smart" if you have something viral. You don't choose your scale or the speed of your growth once a few people discover you. You will end up working insane hours just to keep the infrastructure alive. (this is strictly for software businesses, btw. but I can think of an instance of D.C. hole in the wall sandwitch joint that got reviewed on NPR. Nothing like a flesh-DoS, and you can't tell that guy he doesn't need to put in insane hours.)

cletus 16y ago

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.

shareme 16y ago
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
- Groxx 16y ago
  Risk aversion makes sense from a biological standpoint, though. Males are expendable, thus must show off to get mating rights (because we don't live in a world where women are won (in most places)). As to the Modern World, men rarely take maternity leave. That's a long time to be away from a job, a large risk for the company, at a possibly highly inopportune moment. Risk.

timcederman 16y ago

I'll simply point out that this is Penelope Trunk, who previous wrote about how she had two abortions for her career. http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2009/06/17/whats-the-connection-between-abortions-and-careers/ http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2009/06/17/whats-the-connectio...

gcheong 16y ago
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.
davidj 16y ago
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.

jacquesm 16y ago

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.

frossie 16y ago
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.
araneae 16y ago
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.

edw519 16y ago

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.)

barredo 16y ago
We live in amazing times if a woman can have her 6th child at 46, I assuming both the mother and the child are completely healthy.
Watermelon 16y ago
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...
- Jun8 16y ago
  I think you've got it wrong. I think the point he was trying top make is the time management aspect (as parents know, kids are a huge time sink, god bless'em). I've got only one, and he's making it extremely hard to put extra time on anything. So, actually having N kids is nothing to boast about, doing so while being able to do anything meaningful is.
  - Watermelon 16y ago
    I know a medical doctor who had 14 kids (oh, those catholics). And she still managed to practise medicine when she was not spreading her legs to launch another baby in this world. Sounds much more impressive than managing a baseball team, imho. The OP wants the HN crowd to assure him of what a special and unique snowflake his sister is, when she's merely doing something that is the norm in some parts of the world.

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DevX101 16y ago

She raises some valid points. I'm in my late twenties, and I do want to have a family some day, but to be honest, it's not a burning issue for me right now. I feel fairly comfortable that 10 years from now I could find an attractive woman who I can share my life with. What I CANNOT feel comfortable with however, is still toiling away 10 years from now, still trying to get my first break. As men, we have a longer runway to start a family which certainly has an impact on the numbers of women in this endeavor.

ahoyhere 16y ago

I do wish women with a chip on their shoulders would stop getting all aggro about observations that are not prescriptions. You saying "that's not true" is just as globalizing as "this is true." There is just something about women and product businesses that's weird. I recently put on a conference about bootstrapping paying products only, and I looked for ages to find a single woman bootstrapper like myself. They can't be found. There are uncountable zillions of women freelancers, women running agencies, women coding, women designing, women writing, women coaching. There are way more women running tech startups that have VC funding than there are with bootstrapping. I can name 5 to 7 female founders with VC off the top of my head -- to my mind, they have better brand name recognition than male founders (the only men I can think of by name, I know personally). But, after days and days of searching and mining my (RL) social networks, I was able to identify only ONE single fellow bootstrapper (and she's "only" part of a 4-person team). And she's not from The Land of Opportunity, if you know what I mean. Outside of tech, there are lots of women who've gotten loans or other capital to make ands sell physical goods, of all the risky-ass things they could do. Or restaurants, shops and cafes. So, obviously there are many women who are not afraid of entrepreneurship and not really risk-averse. Selling specialty shoes or front-end web dev is much, much riskier than creating a paying digital product, and less remunerative than doing a startup with funding. (And most of those funded startups are "social long shots" -- not product businesses.) I don't have the answer, but there is something weird going on there. But I don't think it's an external thing. Nobody is keeping those other women down. That said, I'm a married woman in my mid-20s. I married when I was 24 and launched my product business right after. If I ever wanted to have kids (which I do not), I would definitely wait, because the "have it all" thing is definitely a myth. You end up either shortchanging your kids or your work, unless you're totally unstoppable (and who is?).

geuis 16y ago
I'd like you to talk to my friend Esther Flatto. She is working on a product called the Flip Slip. geuis.teses@gmail.com
lizzy 16y ago
There are way more women running tech startups that have VC funding than there are with bootstrapping. Really? I'm not so sure. Perhaps it is just hard to hear about the women that are bootstrapping tech companies. Companies that are being bootstrapped typically are pre-traction, and have not received the buzz in the tech media that comes with raising a funding round.

jscore 16y ago

Now, that's some serious linkpaid or commentbait. Surprised it wasn't written by MG Siegler.

_delirium 16y ago

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/0520244354 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 16y ago
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.

fablednet 16y ago

On a pure headline level, this is more suited for The Onion than TechCrunch.

ajju 16y ago

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". What a shameful way to get attention!

dgabriel 16y ago

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?

ax0n 16y ago

This seems like much more of a cultural phenomenon than a biological one.

seldo 16y ago

"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.

mfukar 16y ago

Oh my, the extrapolation is making my brain shrink!

QuantumGood 16y ago

Hey, a child IS a startup...and you can't be risk averse to create one.

sbov 16y ago

I generally find the use of "never" interesting. 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.

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atari 16y ago

In other news, this is called the "biased sample" fallacy. 1. Sample S, which is biased, is taken from population P. 2. Conclusion C is drawn about Population P based on S. http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/biased-sample.html http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/biased-sample.html

dennisgorelik 16y ago

To see why women focus on children I'd recommend this article by the same author: http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2006/06/01/get-married-first-then-focus-on-career/ http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2006/06/01/get-married-first-t...

ashedryden 16y ago

Women did not evolve against risk taking and startups: http://restructure.wordpress.com/2010/10/04/women-did-not-evolve-against-risk-taking-and-tech-startups/ http://restructure.wordpress.com/2010/10/04/women-did-not-ev...

dgabriel 16y ago
This blog is fantastic. Thank you for sharing.

Mz 16y ago

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. My 2 cents.

SabrinaDent 16y ago

Couple of points: 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.

petercooper 16y ago

"Men Don't Want To Run Startups Because They'd Rather Watch Football"

joelmichael 16y ago
Watching football isn't a very good comparison with having children, let's try... Men Don't Want To Have Children Because They'd Rather Run Startups

sliverstorm 16y ago

> My startup is me and a bunch of twenty-something guys. And if you’re a woman launching a startup, my advice is to stick with this crowd. They never stop working because it’s so exciting to them: the learning curve is high, they can move anywhere, they can live on nothing, and they can keep wacky hours. Certainly, as a 20-something guy, that DOES sound pretty exciting, and I can't imagine any of my female friends going for it.

arithmetic 16y ago

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.

joshcrews 16y ago

I think children themselves _are_ startups. They require a ton of effort and long hours getting started, have a growth phase, and then start to pay returns and become more self-sufficient. In a sense, women are involved in startups when they choose to have kids. Background info: In the past year, I've started my family (first baby) and worked on several startups as a Rails developer (FYI, I'm a man).

MrFlibble 16y ago

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.

Swoopey 16y ago

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.

maxawaytoolong 16y ago

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?

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annajohnson 16y ago

Not this woman. Ever since I was young I wanted to build a big business (i.e. NOT a 'lifestyle' business) and also raise a family. I never, ever saw it as an 'either/or' decision and maybe that's why I'm doing both.

qeorge 16y ago

I'd love to hear the author say this to the women in my family with a straight face. - My mother and her best friend (also a woman) started a business last year (her 2nd), and she's looking at starting a third. - My stepmother founded/runs a non-profit (her 2nd or 3rd, not sure). - My sister declared she wanted to be a dean at age 18. 12 years and 3 degrees later, she's now a dean at American. - All 4 of my aunts run their own businesses, three have done several and the fourth started hers this week. One currently owns/runs one of the larger companies in Germany. Anecdotal evidence be damned!

untamedmedley 16y ago

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.

callmeed 16y ago

If there was an "education blogosphere", I wonder if they'd have a constant stream of articles trying explain why there are so few male elementary school teachers (14%).

_corbett 16y ago

it saddens me that such linkbait generalizations make it to the frontpage of HN it strikes me as insane that discussion on these issues centers around the mean (pun intended). being an entrepreneur one is a few sigma away already; we can't even see the average from here so why are we wasting time chatting about it?