It's not a great deal to raise the kids and support the household while your absent S.O. spends all their time trying/failing to become some V.C.'s lottery ticket.
(I'm not talking about CEOs of well-funded startups. I'm talking about all the people who throw their lives away chasing that dream in circles around the startup-industrial complex.)
Just because someone has kids doesn't mean they're spending the same time with them... also age of the kids matter. High school kids don't need as much help with things as little kids.
It's not a must that woman work in this day and age.
Unless we're relegating/gatekeeping 50+ year olds from starting startups? Especially during retirement, there's still a lot of time to do stuff.
The vast majority of people seem to live in denial that ageing is a fact of life and that you get slower and less energetic as you age and that you start ageing immediately (at 20 you're already losing somethings you had when you were younger), not when you're 65.
To the extent that’s impossible because you “fall off the track,” I agree that’s an problem.
Even for the roles that are incompatible we should strive to give the humans who specialize in those roles (and most such roles are highly specialized) as many opportunities as we can to take extended breaks from their duties to raise small kids if they wish without fearing for their financial security. I believe we will be very thankful for such policies once all those kids reach adulthood.
[0]https://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-real-reason-companies-...
I think prospective mothers in tech should find common cause with other groups of people who suffer because the expectation is that everything in a startup is event driven and that each event is automatically the highest priority.
When a plane crashes, we expect the NTSB to be 'responsive'. The meaning we use here is a quality we generally expect large organizations to lose - the ability to notice problems, take them seriously, and aggressively work to do something about them. That's not the same definition that I see people apply to startups. Startups are instead chronically run like a Skinner box, only you're the box.
If my career has a thesis it's that we have tools, literal and figurative, that let us "move fast and not break things". For some developers these tools seem like nice to have or a distraction (the White Knuckle Crew), for others they only see the value during an incident or a crunch, but to others they're essential for sanity, be you remote, a night owl, easily distracted, disabled, long commute, a caregiver, or prospective parent/pet owner.
From my knothole it seems like a lot of the infrastructure people build up in order to become an 'adult' organization is presumed to be something that you develop in-house shortly after the Last Responsible Moment, instead of something we expect from our tools out of the box. But that's probably more a consequence of the fact that few people demand it, so it hasn't gotten done.
If everyone has to be a hero, then you get mostly unattached bachelors in moderate to perfect health. Do you want an Old Boy's Network? Because that's how you get an Old Boy's Network.
I think the expectation of being able to do both is quite unfair, at least the expectation of being able to do both well. There are many things that aren't compatible with being a cofounder. For example, you're not going to start a successful SaaS company while being a deployed Marine rifleman, or an NFL quarterback, or EMT, or solo truck driver. We need to stop telling people they can not only do anything they want, but everything they want.