That's fine I guess. I'm sure there's a good hacker out there that is interested in the different parenting styles of French and American mothers. Though I'm not sure about the plural of hackers. That might be a stretch.
There are also hackers out there that are interested in politics, salad recipes, what Bill Murray is doing, and lolcats. I just feel like I'm on Reddit is all.
I can't imagine the amount of channel noise generated by certain keywords. And for every one you'd have to do a time consuming search through the user's social graph(s).
There should be a function in the scraper that gives each user a unique ID, and retains an instance count of keyword 'hits'. Over time, the user would build up a 'heat rating' and IDs could be sorted by this. That way, people generating keyword noise over and over again could be separated from the general population for a closer look.
>all of those things are vapid and empty compared to spending time with your children.
Yes, for some. Come to think of it, spending time with the kids is probably the number one reason men downshift (by choice) as well.
What is complicated and not fully understood by me is how accurately we have accounted for women who voluntarily choose to downshift in all of the 'glass ceiling' statistics. I think that the glass ceiling is very real, but I just wonder how trustworthy the stats are. It's complicated.
I think she made some very good points. It was a bit ranty, and self contradictory at times:
>On top of that there is evidence that the members of the VC community go out of their way to attract women. Of course, this makes sense. VCs look for underserved markets. Women are likely to address different markets than men, and since there are so few women founders compared to men founders, it’s likely that women are addressing an underserved market.
and then this:
>Whoever started the TED Women’s conference is pathetic.
Uh, ok. Right on TED Women's webpage they say that "Over the past several years, a flood of fascinating data from the worlds of education, microfinance and more has shown an essential link between investing in women and girls and economic growth, public health, political stability."
And it goes on to state that TEDW wants to explore those 'underserved markets' to borrow the author's words, in greater detail, -behavior that she just got finished praising.
But whatever, I'm nitpicking. I think the general thrust of most of her arguments have merit. Women often choose to disengage from the business world to realize life goals that make them happier than what business success can offer them. What guy hasn't had this dream? To be sure, it's probably a different dream. For women, it may involve having children and raising a family for some. For me, it might be throwing caution to the wind and traveling the world. Bottom line is that I think there are some very basic 'non-business' aspirational lifestyles that humans of all walks of life wish they could engage in at different times. Biology and culture have conspired to offer women one of them up on a silver platter if they so choose. Many do, and there's nothing wrong with that.
EDIT: I don't know how scientific this is, but just an ironic post I came across browsing just now. Check out #2 on the list: