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:
1. Women who kept working, never had kids
Ginni Rommety: Board Member JP Morgan
Lucy Peng: Board Member Lazada (Alibaba group)
Polina Raygorodskaya: Board Member Wanderu
Julia Hu: CEO of Lark.
Anda Gansca: CEO Knotch
Alicia Morga: CEO No. 8 Media
Mary Meeker: Investor
Gina Bianchini: CEO Mighty Networks
Heather Harde: Investor
Jenny Lee: Investor
Kathryn Minshew: Investor
Christy Liu: Various startups
Zoe Barry: Various startups
Kegan Schouwenburg: Various startups
2. Women who quit working when they had kids, husband is an investor
Patricia Calfee: Two kids.
Jessica Livingston: Two kids.
Leah Culver: One kid.
Alexa von Tobel: Three kids.
Alisa Matsanyuk: One kid.
Sheryl Sandberg: Two kids.
Note: Sheryl Sandberg was COO of Facebook when she wrote Lean In telling women not to quit work to take care of kids. Then she quit work to take care of her kids.
3. Women who kept working, had kids with a stay-at-home husband
Amy Hood: CFO of Microsoft; two kids
Michelle Zatlyn: CEO of Cloudflare; two kids
Alex Cavoulacos: COO of Hug; two kids
Marissa Mayer: Board member Walmart, AT&T, Starbucks; three kids
Ursula Burns: Board member Uber, Exxon, Nestle and others, two kids
Ruth Porat: President and CIO of Alphabet, Google’s parent company); three kids
Angela Ahrendts: Board member Airbnb, Ralph Lauren; two kids
Padmasree Warrior: Board Member Spotify; one kid
Safra Catz: Board member Oracle; two kids
4. Women who kept working, had kids without a stay-at-home husband. It didn’t go well.
Me: Writer. Divorced. Two kids. Significant instability documented in real time.
Caterina Fake: Angel investor. Divorced. One kid who ran away from home as a teen and a state-wide search ensued.
Weili Dai: CEO FLC Technology Group. Cofounded with husband. Two kids. When asked about the husband/wife team making time for family she said, “Those hours are pretty short.”
Julia Hertz: CEO of Eventbrite. Cofounded with husband. Four kids. When asked about making time for children, she said, “During labor I just kept answering customer service emails. I've always felt like the kids are getting on my train. I'm not stopping the train…I don't do playgrounds.”
Arianna Huffington: CEO Thrive Global. Divorced. Two kids. One wrote about being addicted to cocaine in high school as a result of her parents’ career choices.
Meg Whitman: Board member Nature Conservancy. Husband is a surgeon. Son took a voluntary leave of absence from college after being accused of sexual assault.
Susan Wojcicki: (Deceased) Husband is a director of product at Google. Five kids. One died in college from an overdose.
The best case was divorce. The worst cases resulted in harm to the kids.
What I learned:
Some women never had children and continued working without interruption. Their careers progressed steadily into executive, board, or investor roles. This group doesn’t tell us how to combine career and family. It tells us what happens when the problem never arises.
But the women who did have children while maintaining their careers actively suppressed information about how they made it work.
After Michelle Zatlyn had her first child in 2013, her peers encouraged her to talk publicly about being a mother and a co-founder at a high-growth tech firm. She chose not to. “I didn’t want people to label me as a woman,” Zatlyn told INC Magazine. “I was a founder, I was Michelle, and I happened to be a woman. But I wanted to be known as an entrepreneur.” Meanwhile, her stay-at-home husband was raising two kids.
Marissa Mayer became CEO of Yahoo and immediately ended work-from-home options for all employees. Then she commandeered the office next door to hers for a private nursery for her new baby and nanny. When she eliminated remote work, the New York Times quoted Ruth Rosen, a professor emerita of women’s history: “The irony is that she has broken the glass ceiling, but seems unwilling for other women to lead a balanced life in which they care for their families and still concentrate on developing their skills and career.”
Ruth Porat said she doesn’t like the term work-life balance because it’s sets people up for failure. She never mentioned that her stay-at-home husband was doing the balancing for her.
Rob Henderson describes this dynamic: “Women in corporate leadership create environments that make reproduction difficult for the women below them. They do it through culture and expectations. Long work hours become mandatory. The message is clear: serious women don’t let children slow them down.”
This helps explain why section three of this list is the longest. Women publicly insist that there’s no higher priority for young women than organizing their lives around a career, yet all those women have children—and stay-at-home husbands making it possible.
They don’t talk about how women who are married and have children report the highest levels of happiness. Instead, they emphasize the importance of career and the burden of children while hiding the support structure that enabled them to have both.
Individually, the women on this list “disrupted tech.” As a group, they provide a blueprint for college-age women to make decisions about their adult life:
If you want a family, make it a priority. This means making a conscious decision about whether you will stay home with the children or your partner will stay home. Don’t underestimate how early successful women set this up.
The data also shows that women with stay-at-home husbands married men whose careers were clearly smaller than theirs. Of the nine women in Section 3 all but Angela Ahrendts picked a husband specifically to be the stay-at-home parent. Women who married career equals—a surgeon, a Google director, a co-CEO—couldn't ask those men to step back.
Porat’s marriage announcement in the New York Times said, “Ruth Porat Wed to Law Student.” They knew from the beginning she would have the outward-facing life.
Women who tried to keep working and have kids without a stay-at-home husband failed significantly in at least one aspect of their life. Most examples led to divorce. Disturbingly, I was one of those people. I also noticed that in all sections most women did not have a big exit. They sold their startup for a small amount and married investors, or just went to the next job. I’ve been feeling bad that I never had a big exit. But it was the wrong focus. I should have been feeling bad that each time I dated an investor I hated it.
Thank you for speaking more truth in this post, it reminds me of your post about ‘marrying rich’, with so many women held up as role ideal for ‘having it all’ yet covering the truth about the team of help they actually have that enables them to give the appearance of ‘having it all’. The high power mothers with help and lie about it are part of the ‘work/life balance’ lie that is being perpetuated. Reading the link about Ruth Porat was eye opening and it makes me wonder why she bothered to have children at all.
As a woman who has struggled financially I made a conscious decision to be child-free but I’ve kept that to myself because society doesn’t like women who CHOOSE TO BE CHILDFREE, yet they applaud high powered women who are masquerading as mothers who don’t spend much time with their children.
I’m curious to see the responses at LinkedIn, I bet it really is quite the sociology experiment!
Thank you again for pointing out the truths and hypocrisy of ‘powerful women’ 👍🏼🙏🏼💪🏼
Brilliant and insightful thank you!