Farewell to the Wet Nurse by Etienne Aubry (1776)
For hundreds of years, middle-class women have maintained their social position by making childcare into dirty work that only desperate women do. The wet nurse was the original outsourcing: a poor woman feeding another woman’s child while the middle-class mother kept for herself the clean, socially acceptable parts of motherhood. Read more
TechCrunch published a list of 30 women disrupting tech in 2011, and I was on the list. Since then I’ve tracked how the women manage kids. Almost all the women were childless at the time, but enough years have passed that we can see what happened next.
The women fall into four categories: Read more
The CDC’s fixation on Tylenol is a distraction. Every few years op-eds ask if Tylenol causes autism. The latest? Evidence inconclusive. Yes, autistic women take more Tylenol. And the debate stops right there.
Meanwhile, autistic women live in reality. The run on Tylenol is because doctors communicate poorly with autistic women. Autism is tied to chronic pain, gut issues, asthma, and PCOS — the impact on physical health is so significant that computers can pick out autistic people just by watching us walk. Read more
TIME magazine celebrated the 100 Most Influential Women with TIME’s Wealth Leadership Forum, where the message was clear: you’re incompetent at managing your money.
On stage, three unimpressive women scolded The Most Influential about risk-taking, wealth accumulation, and the dangers of not thinking ahead. Each of three panelists used trumped-up titles to hide the same formula: marry rich first, glossy career second. Read more
Detail of Watermelon & Knife by Wayne Thiebaud (1989)
The setting: I’m buried—raising kids while running a startup. It’s 2010 and I’m one of the only female founders getting funded. I feel obligated to speak up, so I write blog posts telling women: startups are BS, just say no.
The Real Housewives of Venture Capitalists
Alexa Tsotsi said I was terrible for women. Jessica Wilson said I was tone-deaf to feminism.
So where are they now? Both married venture capitalists. Both talk about their amazing businesses—built with their husbands’ money and networks. If they get bored, they stop. They use their husbands’ money for schools and childcare, then write about their accomplishments as if they’re on a level playing field. Read more
In 2016 a sharp divide emerged in the US in baby naming, and this divide sheds light on why the Democratic Party is failing.
From the 1980s to 2015, androgynous names for girls surged across America. Taylor Swift’s mother perfectly captured the reasoning when she explained giving her daughter an androgynous name in 1989: “so she wouldn’t be held back if she went into business when she grew up.” This was hedge fund manager Andrea Swift applying the logic of her generation: if the world is rigged for boys, give your girl a name that lets her compete.
Read more
I had to retrain my brain to be a parent. It took a decade because I was going through the five stages of grief. For me, the longest stage was denial, because as long as I kept working full time I didn’t have to deal with the reality of my new life. Read more
From the series Emotional Kintsugi by Glen Martin Taylor
Ever since I read Emily Oster’s first book, I’ve tried to ignore her, but her bestselling books just kept coming. I found solace reading complaints about her sloppy analysis. And I took the MacArthur Foundation to be delivering a secret message when they gave her husband, Jesse Shapiro, a genius grant for describing misinformation in mainstream media.
But I can’t hold back anymore.
After 20 years of blogging, learning to do academic research was a steep learning curve. People told me to ask for help from professors at Harvard because they’d feel obligated to help me because I’m at Harvard as well. In fact most did not even feel obligated to reply to my email. But Claudia replied.
