Female Founder Secrets: Fertility
Your whole blog resonates deeply with me. All this corporate grifting and women&#x27;s empowerment months will do jack shit until we figure out how to make workplaces and lives more equitable for mothers and allowing for gaps, breaks and destigmatizing time off for parents of both genders.<p>Instead, we talk about how sexism is the biggest problem. Sure, sexism might be annoying, but in the west, it is hardly something that creates a genuine barrier for women.<p>Startups have it worst, and everday I count the number of years I have to work in the high stress places I want or do a startup if I want to have two kids before 35. No one talks about planning around fertility. When I mention it to someone that I want to take time off for a couple years to have children in silicon valley, they look at me as if I&#x27;m an alien. As if wanting to be pregnant and not working at the same time as being sleep deprived and wanting to spend time with my own baby when they are at their youngest is some strange outlandish fantasy.<p>All careers are built this way. PhD to tenure, startups, generally high stress professions. I wish the world wasn&#x27;t so male centric, that feminists actually cared about finding structural solutions instead of forcing women to become copies of men to achieve gender parity. But they care more about power than actual equality where we acknowledge that women have different needs and desires, that those needs and desires are equally valuable and not inferior to desires men have, that the two genders have different strengths and capabilities and it is equally important to reward both. And maybe not wanting to outsource your baby to a nanny during their most vulnerable years is not a heretical thought.<p>I wish we had more focus in allowing people to transition back from taking a few years off to raise young kids, and it wasn&#x27;t automatically assumed that you would be a worse founder or professor or software engineer just because you have 2-4 years you didn&#x27;t commercially work. Hell, I want to take that time to contribute to open source, something I don&#x27;t get to do much usually and I&#x27;m looking forward to it because I am willing to face the  consequences. But I wish more women could be less scared of their career prospects for choosing to have children.