The Children Question
Flicking through twitter this week someone who reads this blog had @ me with a link to a blog post written by Dana Wright, a VC with an powerful career before she got to the venture world. The title is “The Children Question“.
Dana shares her own personal experiences around children and gives advice on how women should react to the children question. It is a question I have been asked many times in different forms. What do I say to an investor who asks me if I am going to have children? What do I tell the investors, board and company that I am pregnant?
Every time I am asked for advice on this, there is a part of me that gets angry. Having children is personal decision. As I have written before and said publicly, do not wait to have children. Your business is important but businesses do not always survive and having a personal life makes your business better. What rambles through my head is if you believe in the founder, then having children is not relevant to her ability to grow her business, and shame on you for asking. Don’t you have kids?
That being said, when will get to that time where there is such a complete shared responsibility for having children that is changes investors fears and misogynist behavior towards some female founders is the bigger question. Things have changed but there is still a lot of work to do.
Dana gives great advice. If you are wondering about the answer to the children question, read her piece.
Comments (Archived):
There was a super interesting piece at the CSM degree show this year that approached this topic using speculative future tech as a device: https://vimeo.com/329327598
Woah. Part of me thinks this is fucked up but another part is just amazed.
This is a hoax or pr stunt of some sort. You can even see the smirks of the actors. There is no Dr. Emma Monte and many of the links on the site are not active. https://www.xxbiosystems.co…If this were actually happening or had happened it would be all over the web in stories (pro and con). The linked research report is complicated enough that most non medical people won’t even know if it relates to what they are selling in any way.Numerous red flags including ‘Summer Baby offer ends July 1 – $25 off’. Seriously? See the site and the screen grab. The address on the site is 203 9th Street Brooklyn NY is dubious as where this would be done. (And 11215 is the zip not 11203 for that matter). Oh yeah even if it was true it would be fucked up!The video creator and domain owner is Rachel Foley:https://www.rachelfoleystud…Her vimeo channel: https://vimeo.com/user39671044 https://uploads.disquscdn.c… https://uploads.disquscdn.c…
Sorry, I should have been more specific. Central St Martins is a premier design school in London. This project was part of a speculative design program, and was meant to stoke conversation on the same social issue that Dana Wright wrote about in the above post. Judging by that response I’d say it was effective!
Ectogenesis (developing the fetus outside the womb) has actually greatly advanced in the last decade. This video above by St. Martin’s students is speculative but not too far off from the near future.You might be interested in this paper on artificial womb technology. https://jme.bmj.com/content…