If you are demanding that working for your startup is your employee's number 1 priority then you probably only want a specific type of person--young and single (male or female).

However, if you run a more sane company married with 3 kids would probably work fine.

There is one difference, though: Males are more likely to postpone having kids for the sake of their career -- because men are biologically more likely to be able to postpone having kids. For a 35 year old childfree woman, having kids is practically "now or never"; for a 35 year old childfree man, having kids is simply a matter of waiting until the right moment and then finding an appropriately-aged woman.

Just imagine the tectonic shift that will take place when this happens. It will change the world in such a deep way that the pill will pale in comparison. Maybe future generations past that point will see such discussions as a symptom of a primitive society.

And I generally don't sleep more than 5-6 hours a night (sometimes much less), or watch any TV, or even waste much time online anymore -- and I track it with RescueTime -- but getting 40 hours a week of real work done is still hard some weeks.

Raising kids -- doing it right, that is -- takes a lot of time & interaction. Then there's time keeping the house functioning & relatively clean, paying bills, grocery shopping, the various trivial little tasks that need doing...

I'm pretty sure 80 hours a week would be impossible unless I stopped sleeping altogether. Even once my daughter is in school, it'd be pretty rough going.

"I still work 80 hours a week," he admitted to Mark Lisheron of the Austin American-Statesman. "It used to be 80 hours on software, now it's 40 hours on software and 40 hours on Armadillo." Carmack did ease up a bit after he and his wife, Anna Kang, had their first child in 2004—he was getting home from the office at about midnight instead of 2:00 AM or 3:00 AM. Kang, however, insists that Sunday is family day, so Carmack compromises by reading technical manuals to his infant son.

ref. http://www.notablebiographies.com/news/A-Ca/Carmack-John.htm...

The argument hasn't been debunked. I don't have the facts to back this up, but I'd guess that on average, men work more hours per year than women with the same jobs, because women tend to give birth and take care of children more than men. The reason there are so many successful female professors is because we've decided as a society that optimizing for hours worked per year is a bad idea with detrimental effects on our lives.

If someone were choosing between a man and a woman of equal skill to work at a startup, wanted to maximize hours worked per year, and didn't care about the law or the effects of their decision on society, they'd pick the man. Fortunately, there are far better indicators than gender of how prone an individual is to take extended leave.

I can't help but wonder if this is significantly influenced by an imbalance in compensation.

When my daughter was born, my wife and I decided that one of us would stay home, and income was certainly a large factor in determining that she would be the one to stay home. If our incomes had been reversed, then I would have become a stay-at-home dad.

As soon as a man becomes married this switches. A man is more likely to take on extra hours/responsibilities and a woman is more likely to work part-time at this point. It's the over-time and hazard pay that is associated with the wage gap. A person working 80 hours per week should not have the same hourly-wage as someone working 30 hours per week regardless of gender.

Also from what I have heard is that in the sciences, it is extraordinarily hard to succeed as a professor and a mother at the same time unless you simply don't want to take time off to spend with your newborn and expect your kid to be factory-farmed.

Edit: What's up with the downvotes? It seems like they go up and down this thread largely randomly. Are people just downvoting things they disagree with?

I am sure that that is not what you are trying to say. Could you maybe explain why it is that man cannot have an equal (or larger) part in raising their children?

This means that never-married fathers have few if any rights that are not contingent first on responsibilities, while never-married mothers control the legal process every step of the way. In fact, the mother is not (and cannot be) legally required even to inform the father that he is a father and can hence give up the child for adoption without the father being able to assert custody.

There is no solution to this problem (of equality in parenting for never-married couples) that we as a society can live with, so it is then obvious that fathers cannot be legally or socially equal parents.

Now among married couples this comes into play too but differently. If a woman has an affair and gets pregnant by another man and the husband doesn't find out about it for, say, 3 years, the child is legally his and even if they divorce he may have to support someone else's child.

This means that for women, motherhood is both a biological and social fact, but for men fatherhood is purely a social/legal fact.

BTW, this also raises interesting issues--- it means that because as men and women can never be equal parents in our society, the ways in which we enforce this also mean that same-sex couples can not be fully equal to opposite-sex couples--- they either end up legally favored or disfavored depending on how presumption of paternity works in a given state.

It would be far better to ensure that taking a year or two off would allow smooth resumption of the tenure track. That's the fix.

Of course, then einhverfr went on to the whole abortion/child-support/false-paternity thing, so I don't know anymore.

The thing is, our economy is based on two fundamental assumptions:

1) Labor and capital are separate. Capital hires labor. 2) Labor works outside the home, capital can control things.

The second problem arises pretty clearly (and intractably) from the sort of worker protection laws that Belloc describes in "The Servile State." I.e., by treating employees as the responsibility of the employer, you have serious issues regarding workers comp and so forth when an employee is working outside of an environment that the employer controls.

The example Belloc gives is this:

A farmer hires two men to dig a well. The first is being lowered into the hole by the second and he lets the rope slip and the first worker is injured. If all three were independent agents, the first worker's lawsuit would be against the second worker, but instead it is the employer who is responsible. So this leads to an employer legally compelled to control the workplace. Things like telecommuting are challenging this but only seem to work in certain narrow domains.

So a lot of kinds of work cannot be done in the home for this sort of reason. This means that family life cannot be integrated with work life and therefore must be separate.

To me the answer is to recognize that a labor/capital divide in context with fundamental differences in the nature of motherhood and fatherhood, leads to economic discrimination against women. If we recognize that, then we can challenge that divide and build a more just economy based on smaller units where work life and family life are not so separate.

So these are all pieces of a very complex cultural phenomenon.

Has anyone advocated against this?

Even if this were true, it doesn't mean that men get more stuff done. I' be interested in a study that measures the difference in job performance for equal compensation levels between men and women. Even that study might be biased because there's some evidence that if a woman and a man perform at exactly the same level, men get better ratings, but it would be better than simply measuring hours "worked".

I also think throwing in statements that disparage women with the caveat that "I don't have the facts to back this up" is irresponsible and contributes to the sexism problem.

In my opinion, pointing out my own lack of a citation is a better practice than making uncited claims of fact. It's an invitation to prove me wrong, but the lack of a citation in itself doesn't make me wrong.

There's a difference between these three statements:

1. Women and men are different - obviously true and too vague to be meaningful.

2. Women have breasts while men do not - obviously true and mostly (and hopefully) irrelevant to this discussion.

3. Women work fewer hours than men - A specific claim about women that may be used by some to justify their prejudices against women. I don't doubt that you made the claim without malice, but unfortunately these are the kinds of remarks that reinforce sexist stereotypes. For this reason, I wish people wouldn't make such claims unless there is watertight evidence backing these claims.

"Women work fewer hours than men - A specific claim about women that may be used by some to justify their prejudices against women."

From my original comment: "Fortunately, there are far better indicators than gender of how prone an individual is to take extended leave." Choosing a man over a woman based on gender alone isn't just bad for society; it's poor reasoning.

Women do often end up taking much more time off, but it is absolutely not clear that has anything to do with "breasts and uteri". I would argue it's cultural.

The lower bound for men is zero.

Maybe it is zero for men who expect their wives to do all the parenting. It's certainly not zero for everyone else.

Objectively, his bounds make sense. You may not like what that data means, but that in and of itself doesn't make him sexist.

Every stat I run into on the matter shows career focused women being less likely to have children or have them much later in life. Apparently there is a limiting resource whether it is time, money, or energy.

If by raising you mean outsourcing to a factory farm....

The fact is that today it's getting harder and harder for women to both have careers and raise their kids (instead of outsourcing that to day care centers and the like).