Quote: (07-07-2014 07:42 PM)Basil Ransom Wrote:
Judging by her frame and face, she isn't very androgynous physically speaking. Given that, there's a good chance she could simply train herself to speak in a more feminine manner, as could many other American women. She swallows her voice as well. I'm guessing she grew up in an environment where everyone is asexual, like San Francisco, Portland, engineers, nerdy family, etc.
Agree here. Also judging by what she says in the video, plus the way she dresses (all black), I think she fancies herself a female Steve Jobs.
At her peak, if she had grown up around feminine girls and styled herself appropriately, and did some Brazilian workouts, she'd be an 8 or so. But then she wouldn't have delivered this fantastic technology.
Quote: (07-07-2014 07:42 PM)Basil Ransom Wrote:
I always say feminist careerism is a sham because most people, men or women, work at jobs at which they are utterly irreplaceable (you mean replaceable, right?) and insignificant in the grand scheme of things, jobs which, if women abandoned them in favor of rearing healthy traditional children, society would be much improved. But there is a small exception for which this may not be true - and women like Holmes are in that small group.
I wouldn't go as far as saying it's a sham, but I also believe this example will be interesting to see play out. I think she had an insider's view into this world, a very privileged view that few women (or men) would be able to replicate. She 'shunned' Stanford but was probably educated by the best private schools in Texas, which is a haven for magnet schools.
After fishing around, tell me how many people could replicate
her story:
Quote:Quote:
When she was young, Elizabeth read a biography of her great-great-grandfather, the first Christian Holmes, who was a decorated World War I veteran, engineer, inventor, and surgeon after whom a hospital at the University of Cincinnati Medical Center is named. When she was 8, her family took a trip there to see a display about him....
...When Elizabeth turned 9, her father took a private sector job with the industrial conglomerate Tenneco. ... But the most striking thing about his 9-year-old’s “Dear Daddy” letter was its first sentence: “What I really want out of life is to discover something new, something mankind didn’t know was possible to do,” she wrote....
...So when Elizabeth was about 9, her parents found them both a tutor to teach them Mandarin on Saturdays. Elizabeth then supplemented those lessons with summer language programs at Stanford and, later, at two universities in Beijing. Captivated by computer programming in high school, she was struck by how the Chinese universities’ information technology facilities lagged behind what she was used to. To rectify that situation, she started her first business while still in high school, selling C++ compilers to Chinese universities.
Imbibing a 9 year old with that entrepreneurial spirit is an amazing thing, something most people don't come across in their lives. Her parents having the means to show her the ropes is an entirely different story. She took FULL advantage of her gifts... but she was certainly gifted.
If you read Outliers, by Malcolm Gladwell, it examines the root of success of a lot of these 'captains of industry,' such as Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. Bill Gates in particular grew up in the era where personal computers did not exist, and computation was carried out through a time consuming process where cards had to be punched... or something. I don't remember the full story. But what it made clear is that Gates had access to a super computer in Seattle which, at the time, was one of the most powerful in the world. As a pubescent teenager, this afforded him way more 'reps' to practice coding compared to pretty much anyone else in the world. He enjoyed a competitive advantage.
This girl probably didn't have THAT crazy of an advantage, and I'm in awe that she's worth $4.5B going the biotech route. But it's misguided to use her, or Gates, or other privileged 'captains of industry' as models of inspiration, because most of them had many fortunate breaks along the way.
TLDR; Basil's right, 99.99% of women would be delusional to ignore their biological clock in favor of an entrepreneurial career.