It really depends on how you plan to run your startup. If you require 80 hour weeks then no, a women with a young child isn't going to cut it. However, neither is a man with a young child.
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.
If you require 80 hour weeks then no, a women with a young child isn't going to cut it. However, neither is a man with a young child.
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.
Well just like the pill, science can come to our rescue over here too. As the costs associated with cryonically storing tissue drops with improvement in technology and methodology, sooner or later it will be possible for almost all women to get their eggs stored for later use in their 20s.
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.
Not that I encourage this particular lifestyle, but some people do manage to do this successfully. John Carmack, for instance, works 40 hours per week on iD, 40 hours per week on Armadillo, and still manages to raise two children.
I agree, it can be done, but if he is really working 80 hours per week most weeks (it's different if maybe he is constantly taking vacations or something), then I wouldn't really call that raising two children. I'd say his wife is raising them, and he sees them occasionally on weekends. This some kind of value judgment, just looking at the amount of time in a week, and there's no way it's enough for both.
Right... I have a small child and I actually do my fair share of raising her.
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.
My understanding is that he works 13-14 hours per day, 6 days per week, and he takes Sundays off entirely for family time:
"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.
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.