[austincheney]

> Anyone who argues that there should be "More women in tech"

I don't think there is any problem (shortage) of women in tech, but this is a substantial deficit of women in startup tech. There could be many reasons for this, but I suspect this is due to the personalities needed at an early stage startup and some degree of narcissism or self-interest that many developers (particularly women developers) find less appealing.

[RandomInteger4]

Perhaps this is also due to risk aversion?

[DoreenMichele]

Women tend to be more risk averse in part because they are capable of getting pregnant and women are generally expected to put their kids first. A man puts his career first and hardly sees his kids, he's a good provider. A woman puts her career first and misses a birthday party, she's a bad mother and a monster.

In order to raise a child with someone so you can make parenting a priority, you need to put their career first. In order to raise a child alone, you need to make so much money that you can afford a nanny and that still is tough because good childcare you trust is tough to find. (A US senator recently gave a speech about how the challenges of finding good childcare nearly derailed her career and her aunt resolved it by showing up to do the childcare.)

[RandomInteger4]

Yes, this is what I meant. I should have been more clear in my statement. Maybe I'm mistaken, but being in a startup seems like a riskier career move than taking a job with an established player in tech, which is why women would be more averse to joining a startup.

[DoreenMichele]

I'm a woman. I was agreeing with you and expanding on some of the why.

It's all good. I saw nothing wrong with you bringing this up.

I'm very aware of the children angle because of having kids. I didn't think it would impact my life in the way it did. So I've thought a lot about it and read up. I try to add some female perspective to the HN discussion because it's an overwhelmingly male environment.

Carry on.

[chillacy]

The evolutionary psychology explanation is a couple steps away from the biological explanation:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/24485492/

I prefer the biological explanation because someone will invariably nit the EP for being infalsifiable, and at least with the bio explanation there is a pharmacological “solution ” to any man or woman who wants to be more risk tolerant.

[DoreenMichele]

I generally agree, but with a couple of provisos:

1. Birth control methods are not infallible. They reduce the risk of pregnancy. They don't eliminate it.

I knew a woman whose mom was diagnosed with a tumor when they thought she was tool to have a baby. They scheduled her for surgery. The "tumor" they removed turned out to be an unplanned pregnancy.

My life changed course when I turned up unexpectedly pregnant due to the failure of my (admittedly not terribly reliable) birth control method. I was already married and wanted kids, so I kind of shrugged and took it philosophically, but it sensitized me to the fact that, no, "just take birth control" isn't some magically perfect answer here.

Even if a woman is celibate, she can be raped and wind up pregnant. This reality means that fertile women can never feel 100 percent in control of their bodies and lives.

2. The personal behaviors that women logically choose to protect themselves and their children end up shaping the culture. Those become expected social norms for women.

Those social norms can be very hard to try to defy and it can cost a woman big time to succeed in defying them. This is likely the real source of the evolutionary psychology explanation.

People get raised with a lot of messaging about what is or is not appropriate behavior and a lot of that messaging is gender specific. "Girls do or don't do this." "Boys do or don't do that."

Some people get more of that kind of messaging than others. It can take a lot of years for a grown woman to question such messaging and decide she can reasonably and safely disregard it.

People who grow up in very strict households often go through a rebellious phase in their youth. A common outcome is they get burned in some manner, such as ending up pregnant out of wedlock while drunkenly hooking up with a stranger.

Such people often wind up even more strict than their parents. Their takeaway is they should have listened to their parents. Their parents were right. These restriction are good and necessary and important.

I'm quite convinced that a lot of religious edicts and cultural norms of the "morality" variety are shorthand explanations for what not to do if you don't want to horrifyingly derail your life in an unrecoverable manner that will also negatively impact the lives of other people.

Before we had antibiotics and birth control, just don't have sex outside of a monogamous, committed relationship was the only real answer to issues like venereal disease and a child you couldn't support. Once you had either of those, you were pretty much stuck with it and your life was basically ruined.

Now we have antibiotics and birth control, some people are still saddled with edicts of "no sex before marriage" and some people are informed "Use a condom. Practice safe sex...etc" Still, there is no cure for AIDS, so we still have diseases where the only good answer is "Jut don't get it to begin with.

Behaviors like "no sex before marriage" don't stand alone. They get paired with edicts concerning myriad other behaviors that are "risk factors" or slippery slopes.

Don't be alone with a boy. Don't drink or do drugs. Etc.

It's quite challenging to unpack all that as an individual within your own lifetime in a timely enough manner to go ahead and accomplish things before you are like 80 years old. Even if you can unpack it for yourself, now you have to deal with everyone else you know still going "You shouldn't be doing that!"

Some of that is slowly changing organically over time. But some of it only happens if you actively push against "But why can't I do x, y or z?" And that's almost always drama.