Hey Silicon Valley--I Have a Gender Equality Solution for Ya!

There has been a lot of talk for years about women in STEM, from trying to get girls to fall in love with science and technology, to getting women to stay in the workforce once they’re trained, a lot of time and effort has gone into studying this problem. Decades of research, funding and programs later and we still have an issue, almost 40% of women leave the field, yet we’re still not entirely sure why.

I applaud programs that seek to encourage females to enter STEM careers and stick with it. I myself have been lucky enough to have been a part of many. But there is one age group that no one is paying attention to: women in their middle age who majored in engineering, but took time off to raise children, that are now empty-nesters.

I know, I know. Why would anyone bother with a 45 y.o. woman, but hear me out. We spend money on programs to train young girls in the sciences, we spend money on programs to get young women to major in engineering. We spend tons of money trying to figure out how to keep them and support them as they raise their children. Yet that’s where it ends. If you chose to leave to raise your kids, you’re gone, forgotten, and let go. But many of those women are done raising kids, and only in their forties. Why not spend some money re-training them and getting them back into the lab?

According to PewResearch in 2014, 29% of women were stay-at-home-mothers. It’s hard to find the data to see how many of them were STEM majors, but of the 40% of women who leave STEM careers, about a quarter of them do so to raise families. This means they didn’t leave because they no longer love engineering, they just chose to take time to raise their kids.

Many of these women are now in their mid-forties and their kids are on the way to college, which leads me to wonder, just how expensive would it be to train these women to become coders and technology workers today? With all the coding bootcamps out there, as well as other retraining programs, why not recruit from this group of women to fill not only your technology needs, but also to balance gender in the workplace?

A few years back, Apple and other big-name companies began offering female employees money to freeze their eggs, with the idea that they can invest in their careers until their late thirties/early forties, and then begin their families. This goes hand-in-hand with the idea of “Sequencing," made popular by the book by Arleen Rosso Cardozo in the early nineties. The idea being that women can have it all, just maybe not all at once. This works for certain types of women, particularly those who enjoy diving deeply into their careers and find the work/family balance to be too difficult.

We all agree that a woman can begin her family at age forty, and that in some ways, she may make an even better parent than she would have when younger, given her life-experience. Then why not say the same about a woman in her forties and her career? If we’re physically and intellectually capable of handling an infant at forty, we’re certainly physically and intellectually capable of coding in our forties. Having done both, trust me, the infant is way more difficult.

So why not include Gen X female engineers who are done raising their families and ready to return to work in your recruitment plans? Why not spend some money retraining them, and growing your female base from this older stage of life, rather than only investing in young girls and college aged women?

To help get the conversation started, here are five reasons to consider recruiting Gen X engineers who are done raising their kids:

1.       They’re already in love with engineering! You don’t have to convince them math is beautiful, or that software rules the world, they already know this. As young girls they were interested in STEM fields and pursued them in college. They naturally have the mindset of an engineer, raising children doesn’t change that. And many of them have just spent twenty years or so raising their own engineers and science loving offspring, like Kim Moldofsky, The Maker Mom, and many of her website’s followers.

2.       They already have engineering degrees. True, the technology has changed, but most have a foundation in engineering, math or computer science. You might be coding in Javascript and Ruby, but C++ is still the sixth most popular language in GitHub, and most of these women have ten+ years using that language before they took time to raise their families. With this foundation, they can easily be trained how to write code using today’s tools and development environments.

3.       They know how to adult. I hate to say it, but it’s true. Women in their forties got their shit together, and they can manage a performance review just fine. In addition, they don’t suffer the same social media/Tinder/out of control rents/roommate issues that younger employees who are just launching from home are dealing with. A woman who has raised children to adulthood is the ultimate adult herself.

4.       They’re done raising kids. This is a big one, and both men and women wonder how to balance work and family. While we still need to continue the important work of bringing that balance to the workplace, many women in their forties are done with this part of their lives and find themselves empty nesters with lots of time to invest in their careers.

5.       They’re excellent program managers. Many educated SAHMs are deeply involved in their communities and often serve in executive roles on school boards, church leadership committees, and other clubs that their kids are involved in. Many also have blogs, write books, and share their love of technology on social media. They haven’t been lounging around eating bonbons the past twenty years, rather they’ve been putting their managerial and intellectual talents towards the next generation. This means that even though they might not have run an international software release in a while, they have for example, overseen the development of a new building for their kid’s school, or launched a new coding club for their kids, or even founded a soccer or gymnastics team. They drew upon their natural leadership skills to do this work, often for free, as a service to their children and the community at large. This capacity is a part of who they are, and all of those skills transfer to the latest apps being developed in the valley.

So there you have it Silicon Valley. Everyone knows you have a gender issue, and I applaud all of the nationwide programs that serve our girls and young women in this way. All I’m suggesting is taking a look at the 25% of Gen X engineers who left to raise their kids, and encouraging them to come back and be a part of the future of your business. What do you have to lose?

In Defense of Work

“When I retire from work, I will finally live the life I’ve always wanted.”

Employment. Earning a living. Our life’s work. Career. Vocation.

Retirement. Freedom. Doing what I really want. Finally free.

What’s the deal with our relationship to work? When I was young, I was told to get a good job, earn a living, then retire and live a life free of work. I would listen to the adults around me and wonder what it meant. As if the only work we do is for another in order to receive money. Where does this idea come from? For if it’s true, then the human being doesn’t do a lick of work before getting that good job, and then after sixty, doesn’t work again.

Anyone who thinks paid work is the only work to be done in life has never been a homemaker. Or a child. Because homemakers and children know, being alive is work.

For children, work looks like play. It begins with learning to walk, talk and think. For three years after birth we work, work, work. Never still, moving, tasting, touching, smelling and yelling! The idea that being alive is just a nine-to-five effort is unthinkable to a growing child. Sleep is the only time that work doesn’t happen. After age three, children play in order to gain social and intellectual skills. Build it up, break it down. Climb the trees and throw the apples. Chase butterflies and jump rope. All of it is work. Granted, it’s not drudgery, but why does pain have to be a part of the definition of “real work?”

But we don’t let children remain in this state for long. As soon as they’re old enough, it’s time to stop playing and start working! Welcome to the adult world—doing what you hate until you’re 65. Then you get to play again.

But do you? Just because you no longer go into the office, doesn’t mean work is no longer necessary. As a homemaker, I haven’t gone into the office for 16 years. But I’m busy from sun up to sun down. 24-7. Raising children is work. Cleaning the house is work. Managing the family schedule is work. Paying the bills is work. All of it is work. Unpaid, but work none-the-less. And the only part that I’ll ever retire from is the raising of the children. It seems that if I follow conventional wisdom, I’ll need to get a 9-to-5 job in order to retire from homemaking!

The point here is that work for some reason has become a dirty word. In addition, so has play. We resent those who don’t do enough work, and we resent those who make us work. We dream of the day when we’re free from work, yet the work of life never ceases.

Life is work. And work isn’t evil.

Labor is a part of the human condition. If that weren’t true, we’d all be Harry Potter. Magic would take care of everything. Even if we automate most of our work, we will not find ourselves free from the work of the body. We need to eat, sleep and exercise. Our immune systems depend on all three. Thus work is required to prepare and acquire food, to keep a safe place to sleep, and to move our bodies. This work doesn’t go away, until we die.

I don’t believe I’ll ever retire, whatever that means. My life has been a constant stream of work, and I feel blessed by it. Some is paid, most isn’t. But all of it is work. I can’t escape it, the only thing I could do is ignore it. But I don’t fear work. Actually, I love it. I’m happy to clean, cook, write novels, manage schedules, write code, raise my children, love my husband, keep in touch with friends, help out at school, build community, read up on current events, shop for healthy food, do the laundry, care for our pets, garden, spin, learn new things, plan vacations, and work hard at keeping my body fit.

Many would look at that list and say, “Yes, but you chose it. You don’t have to do any of it, the way a career demands.” To that I say, wrong. My choice at eighteen years of age had actually been to work fulltime as a software engineer until I couldn’t get out of bed as an old woman. Eventually though, I left the office and stayed home with the kids to balance our lives and provide quality childcare. The work of the home then is something that felt thrust upon me at first. But now it is the rhythm of life.

The work of life must be done, just like a career. Sure we can pay others to do some of it (cook, clean, baby sit, etc.) and we can ignore eating well, sleeping and exercise. But eventually, our bodies and relationships catch up with us and that work we’ve been ignoring can no longer be ignored.

In the end I’ve decided to love the word, WORK. To work is to be alive. To be alive is to be blessed. I see no beginning or end to this. The time to live the lives we love is always only now. To wait until we no longer have to work, is to wait until the moment of death to finally begin to live.

Seems strange to me.

Sex is Fun! The Future of Family Planning

"Sex is natural sex is good, not everybody does it, but everybody should..."

~ George Michael

 

I’ve been thinking lately a lot about sex and family planning in the age of genetic testing, IVF and other advancements. It all started with a conversation I had a few months back with a beautiful, young, Silicon Valley startup founder who is female and fast approaching thirty-six years of age. She told me that she had already frozen her eggs once and was considering doing another round as insurance to her future as a mother. “Right now is not a good time to have a child,” she’d said. “We’re about to consider another round of investment in the company and that means more hours in the office for me.” I thought about it and agreed—to birth a brand new business and a baby at the same time seems like setting yourself up for failure. When I was a young professional though, women didn’t talk like this. We didn’t have the option to freeze our eggs for the future, and even though I’m only five years older than the lovely executive, I entered the realm of professional motherhood long ago, before such technology was considered mainstream. 

Next, I ran across an article about Apple and Facebook, which have begun to offer the benefit of freezing eggs to female employees. Wow! How times change. I began to wonder, what would I have done if this had been an option when I was just getting started? I’m not sure. Would I have saved my eggs for later, in exchange for investing myself in my career back then?

This past week, the idea of saving off your eggs, and sperm, was in the news again. Carl Djerassi, the “father of the pill” has been quoted as saying,

"Women in their twenties will first choose this approach [in vitro fertilization, IVF] as insurance, providing them with freedom in the light of professional decisions, or the absence of the right partner, or the inexorably ticking of the biological clock…For them the separation between sex and reproduction will be 100 percent."

The article continues by giving the reasons for this family planning choice, that both men and women will opt to harvest their eggs and sperm in their twenties, before sterilizing themselves. Then, later in life, they’ll use genetic screening combined with IVF to begin their families when the time is right.

I understand the career aspect for women, but why would men do this? I’ve spoken to several twenty something males who’ve answered in a very similar manner—they really can’t afford children. Combine their high student debt with a poor job market and this generation can’t afford a house, much less a child. So saving off their sperm and getting a vasectomy allows them to have a girlfriend, without the fear of brining a kid along for the very bumpy financial ride called Millennial life after college.

Thus it appears that the current generation is all for this idea. IVF is working fairly well for infertile couples, why not wait and use the technology in this way for fertile couples? I think that this is mostly a good idea, but it also lacks the realities of those who’ve found themselves in their 40’s longing for a child, but unable to conceive. IVF takes a toll on the female body, and it doesn’t always work. Miscarriage is painful to the heart and the entire process can suck the joy of living right out from under you. Until it works, and then the pain was worth it. But sometimes, it doesn't work and the couple finds themselves out $40,000 and looking at other options.

Yet I can still see this as our future. With the technology to screen for disease, we’re already running down the path of normally fertile couples using IVF as a means to conceive. Add the fact that both male and female Millennials are interested in postponing parenthood for financial reasons, and it’s not crazy to imagine a world where sex is 100% for fun.

And here’s one more thing to consider…the ectowomb. As author and Transhumanist Zoltan Istvan wrote in his highly successful article on the subject, “So, here’s a prediction: Instead of adapting our jobs to accommodate the demands of biology, we will adapt our biology to accommodate the demands of our jobs. The fact that only women can give the gift of life is an enviable distinction, yet it is also a burden that can make it harder for working mothers to reach the pinnacle of their professions. One way to ease this burden would be to move away from pregnancy as we know it and toward a reliance on artificial wombs.”

Wow! Can you imagine it? Known as ectogenesis, this technology would allow women to be as old as they wanted when they started their families, and avoid some of the hardships of IVF. In addition, men could start a family with a new sense of freedom as well. This is still in the realm of science fiction, but IVF and designer babies were once myth as well.

Many people are against these sorts of technologies and I understand that. Raising children is seen as sacred, why change the way it’s been done for millions of years? But I’m not in the business of maintaining the current moral standards, instead I’m one who looks into the future, asks “what if?” and follows the line of thinking right down the rabbit hole. I myself will not partake in these family planning adventures. I’ve had my children and am in the homestretch at this point in time. But who knows, maybe my “grandchildren” won’t arrive in the traditional way at the traditional time. Perhaps instead they’ll come from an ectowomb when my son is 60 years old himself? Would I love him, or the child, any less? Hell no! Life is life and precious to me, regardless of the path it has taken to get here.