Feminists

. . . The literal words of "Why I don't take advice from men" instead of trying to understand the broader truth of what the woman was trying to convey.

If that woman were exiting a building one wintery day just as man (yes, even her father) were entering and that man said, "There's a patch of ice just to the right of the front door; watch your step", I'm sure she would give that information its proper due.

The whole point of the video is that men often give life and career advice to women without considering the everpresent reality of their differing roles in the primal experience of reproduction. Women are the ones who conceive the babies, grow them in their bodies, push them out of their bodies at actual physical risk to their health and lives and then their bodies are primed to keep those helpless infants alive by producing its food. Add that basic biological reality to all the social conditioning and expectations on women regarding the rearing of offspring and you can see that any advice that isn't tied to that essential experiential truth is kind of pointless.

The woman is saying that all the "take risks, tough it out, buckle down, make sacrifices and you, too can succeed in business" rah rah talk that the man is offering does not even consider the near impossibilty of doing all those things while being directly-- that is, literally physically-- responsible for another human being who cannot safely (or legally) be left alone and who can't even feed themselves or take care of their bowels and bladder by themselves. The undeniable, flesh and blood truth is that reproduction itself requires women to "take risks" and "tough it out". The vast majority of women in the world also have to "buckle down" and "make sacrfices" just to get the next generation of human beings to a stage of minimal independence.

Any career advice that can just skip right over all that physically and mentally demanding activity as if it never happens is almost completely useless. That is what the video speaker is trying to share. It's like a marathon champion offering tips about breathing, form and endurance who doesn't see that the person he is talking to happens to be missing the bottom half of one leg and is using crutches. Those challenges are not insurmountable and the person dealing with them can learn to run a marathon, but one can't just ignore them.

Anyone wishing to just skip the preceeding five paragraphs above can come to similar conclusions just by looking up-- then seriously thinking about-- the definitions of the verbs, "to father" and "to mother". A man can father a child and then just walk away into a completely unchanged life. A woman-- or a man for that matter-- who takes on the role of mothering a child is in for an intense committment and a heavy work load that only begins to ease up a decade down the line.

Taking on all that responsibility while trying to make money just to live --to say nothing of trying to build a career and become enormously successful by our current cultural standards-- is an incredibly daunting task. Anyone (male or female) trying to be glib about this issue isn't worth listening to.