I should have used the full statement "...and desires" as it is the desires part that I quibble with the most.
If you are mean predictive from the perspective of big data, e.g. differences in search term rates of those that identify as men vs those that identify as women (in as much as search terms represent the modern capture of an individual's needs), maybe. I can believe without presented evidence that there is positive predictive power there and that it is currently being used/exploited.
It is worth calling out that is reductive with the hope that it will trigger a shift in language used to be more inclusive.
Fair point. You are totally right that my description of myself aligns with historical understandings of gender. I was failed to be explicit about my inclusion of my experience of our work/domestic/(implicit and explicit) power balance in my usage. That I "don't feel like I fit" traditional roles definitely contains bias as that is also the view I would like to have of myself.
The reason we appear to have the 1950s responsibility split is my wife sold her business (not HN-levels of success, hence me keeping my job) concurrent with discovering she was pregnant. She didn't have the next thing lined up so she has decided to enjoy being a full-time mother. When she finds the right fit there is a good chance that I will jump to being a full-time parent to support her career aspirations from the domestic side. Presently I do 5 hours of childcare on a normal workday (0600-0900[alone], 1700-1900[with wife]). I would far prefer to do 10 (the entirety of their waking hours).
> To me the issue has always been allowing other to define success for you.
I still find it embarrassingly easy to fall subject to "keeping up with the Jonses" thinking. I hope that ends as some point as I don't want to pass that on to my kids the way it was to me. It sounds like you have gotten over this hurdle so I would definitely like to hear how you did it.
I experienced a variation on that and learned pregnancy is not a vector space. My wife carried twins so when I asked about the "new kid == n weeks of leave" it was _not_ multiplicative. I only got n and not 2n. Boo.
I agree with much of what you say except that "women have different needs". I would say each person has different needs and to divide into the male/female binary is a fairly restrictive definition of gender as I have come to understand it.
My wife and I have twins a little less than 2 years old, we are both ~35, but we live in rural-ish NH not SV. She has taken the last 2+ years off for the pregnancy and to function as primary caregiver while I continue to work. While I don't feel a need to work (perhaps a "need to project" would be closer) I do feel a need to provide for my kids while being with them as much as possible. As such I have chosen a low-stress, 9-5 SWE role optimizing for family time over career advancement. At least for the foreseeable future.
From what we can tell she seems to be the only woman from her MBA class that has taken so much time off from career to have children. I don't want to speak for my wife but my impression is that she feels torn by desires to have a high-power career and to spend all the time with the kids (though pandemic parenting in NE with no third spaces available means that some days it would be an easy choice). Maybe that is society having an outsize impact on her internal valuation of family rearing, but I am not sure.
The point I am making is that kind of gender bifurcation doesn't fit the mold that I (a cis-gendered, white man) fit so I find it less plausible that a less-represented person would match it either as my "group" [more accurate term requested] has largely set the social norms.
We definitely considered using a cell phone to drive position data, but it just didn't get there in terms of my time. Not a huge regret but it would have been nice to feel like I put a technical bow on that project.
I realize your example that no one has the itch for garbage truck fleet management software, but I found myself (via my wife) in that exact situation about 3.5 years ago. She had founded a company providing food waste collection with composting on the backend and it became apparent very quickly in the market-testing phase that the challenges were rooted in logistics for consumer pickup and less in converting customers or processing (at least for our area in New Hampshire).
After a couple weeks of her manually designing pickup routes for the "fleet" I hacked together a demo using TIGER data and OR-tools that planned routes (with autogen'd tick-sheets) and calculated a rudimentary cost-per-mile. While it wasn't saving game-changing amounts of time over her initial route optimizations, removing the manual overhead of generating routes on a daily basis was a big win.
I would say it became a "fleet management" project (if you can call 2 cars, a trailer, and the occasional rental to pick up the slack a fleet) after one of the drivers suddenly heard a "grinding" sound while on route 5 miles from the nearest gas station. Based on the description I guessed that the transmission was dying and had them check the fluid. It didn't register on the dip stick so she dispatched another vehicle to tow back the trailer while the other one limped to the shop. The offending vehicle was one of the fraudulent VW TDI's that just had to get to the dealer's lot for the trade-in value (our goal had been to _barely_ get there under it's own power and it seemed we went a bit too far :) ). "Too far" was using it to tow ~1200# of compost 4 days a week for 6 months with what we determined to be one oil change at the beginning of that period. This experience led to adding a step to the route planning calendar events for maintenance checks for the vehicles in the "fleet" based on their current and expected mileage.
There were a bunch of things that I (in my night-time, engineering resource capacity) wanted to add to the system (tracking with GPS built into car, RFID readers in car and on bucket/totes to remove driver's manual annotations, CANbus diagnostic readout to identify early issues) but before any of those got off the ground she sold the company (hooray!) when we found out she was pregnant with twins and she realized she was way more interested in the physical composting work than the cost-center minimization of the drivers and the fleet anyway.
Since one isn't provided this is the top google result containing the quote [1].
The context of the linked article is that Crowley now works for an admission prep company IvyWise and this quote may not directly reference MIT but his broader experience in this more recent role.