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Hold the Eggs
The news that Apple and Facebook will contribute towards the cost to their female employees of freezing their eggs has not been generally well-received.
The response of Melanie Mcdonagh, writing in The Spectator was not atypical:
This wheeze, which Apple and Facebook came up with simultaneously, has turned out, I’m glad to say, to be a complete turkey in terms of public relations. Female pundits have unhesitatingly identified it as a move designed to convenience not women, but the company. It’s the reduction ad absurdum of the entire ‘career-progress-versus-motherhood’ thing. You want to get ahead? Why not go in for an unnatural and invasive procedure to have babies, which may or may not work out when you’re 45, always supposing you got out enough to find the father for your putative children other than by mail order from Denmark?
Dear oh dear. The use of the phrase “unnatural and invasive” (a description that will, if you take the time to think about it, work well for any number of medical procedures) gives the game away: opposition to Apple and Facebook’s move is more a matter of aesthetics and emotion than reason. The notion that more choice will mean less is an argument of commissar or monk, and should not be taken seriously. As for the idea that the few companies that offer this benefit will use it as an excuse to withdraw other support from women who want to combine motherhood and career, well, to claim that shows a startling lack of awareness of the state of gender politics in the modern American workplace.
Fortunately the Daily Telegraph’s Katherine Rushton is on hand with a more balanced response:
We hear time and time again how biology holds women back in the workplace, how they need to take time off to have children just when they are hitting their stride in their careers. We also hear how the two things we cannot control are the age female fertility starts dropping off a cliff (35), and the fact that only women can bear children.
Egg freezing does not change this, but it goes some way to helping women manage their own careers and families. It makes really demanding jobs a genuine choice for more women, rather than something that they would like to do if it weren’t for maternity leave, breast-feeding, and all those other considerations that come with being a new parent.
What’s more, by climbing the career ladder in their mid-30s, women will be better placed to afford a child later on, and to negotiate with their employers for more flexible working. Women are often chastised for leaving work promptly to look after their children, even if they continue working at home. That will happen less if they have earned their stripes first….
…That is not to say that egg freezing is a silver bullet, of course. The technology is still relatively new so we still do not know much about the success rate of older mothers who use their harvested eggs to conceive.
Well, what we do know is that the success rate is low (I’ve seen a figure of around 20 percent quoted for women who freeze their eggs in their late 30s), although those odds will, hopefully, improve as the technology develops. And we also know that this alternative will not solve the dilemmas faced by many women wondering how they can balance motherhood and career: there are many senses in which this technology is not a silver bullet. Nevertheless, if it helps some women make the choices that they want, it is surely to be welcomed.
Apple and Facebook have done the right thing. And the smart thing too.
Published in General
It is imperative that the government force companies to pay for contraception, but when a company voluntarily pays for fertility technology, it’s anti-woman.
Sounds legit.
What they can’t do anything about is that you have a lot less energy to keep up with a child born when you’re 45 than when you’re 25. And it’s less likely you’ll be seeing grandchildren.
They work at Apple. They’ll have iGrandchildren.
No worries, at 45 they’ll just hire a nanny to keep up with their child so they can continue to work full-time. Otherwise they’ll be throwing away all that time invested in climbing the career ladder.
Well, I wouldn’t do it, but it isn’t like Apple or FB make women choose this option.
Over a long term, such an option could create a competition between the old-fogies who make their babies in an old-fashioned naturally invasive way and the iParents making babies in an unnatural invasive way.
Anyway you put it, babies and children are ‘invasive’ on your life and your career. That is their purpose in life for at least 7 years. Call it a parental reset.
No, call it a civilization reset. :)
You can judge things like this in the abstract, or you can judge them in context. Stripped of its context, it’s easy to see the benefit of egg-freezing. But the feeling behind the entire left-wing gender project seems to be, “Let’s transform women into men.” Everything feminists demand on behalf of women boils down to the same thing: whatever men have. It’s ironic, but maleness, manliness, masculinity is the paradigm feminists seem to aspire to–men are resented for keeping masculinity to themselves for all these millennia.
Egg harvesting is fairly benign, but it’s only a matter of time before scientists announce that they’ve managed the entire gestation of some animal or another in an artificial womb, and the possibility of entirely freeing women from the burdens of pregnancy will become the latest thrilling cause for the left.
I have no idea if McDonagh considers herself a feminist, although as a Speccie columnist I would suspect she’s a modern Tory-ish type, willing to accept the feminist label while still able to criticize the sisterhood. Yet it’s interesting that her critique has the scent of another popular leftist aromatherapy: “Those evil corporations.”
Paul D, the flip side of making women into men, is the making of men into women, which feminist moms have been doing for decades. Thus, “pajama boy” and metrosexuals.
I can see the benefit for Apple and Facebook — energetic, determined, ambitious employees unencumbered by human relationships such as men or children who might take time away from the job. Not sure if it is a wise choice for the women, or the potential children.
If I could have all the same benefits (preferential treatment in criminal and family law, education, careers that don’t require physical labour, etc), then that sounds pretty good to me.
Maybe not, but it should be their choice.
These companies are clearly granting this benefit to encourage women to delay child-bearing. And, many of the women who work at these companies may herald this development. Or, they might have even asked for it. So, hooray for freedom and democracy! Free markets! Women’s rights! Huzzah.
But, it’s still concerning to me that these employers and their employees both agree about one thing: a photo-sharing app and its increased profitability are higher priorities (at least in your 20s and 30s) than establishing a family. That is nuts to me.
And, as Paul pointed out, it just further attempts to transform women into men. Yet, it also fundamentally misunderstands (most) men. Men don’t work hard because they are in love with their work. They may like it and enjoy it, but they ultimately do it because they want to provide for their families. The moment the work no longer provides is the moment most of them would cease doing it.
It’s concerning to you that the sort of people who choose to work at a place like Apple or Facebook would rather put their expensively-obtained computer engineering and business administration skills to use for the corporate good than establish families?
Why?
Why are you so concerned about the choices of such a small and non-representative subset of the population?
P.S. Having a frozen egg surgically implanted in the womb (perhaps by a robot) strikes me as manifestly unnatural and invasive. The scene could have been ripped from an old sci-fi novel.
And, yes, a lot of modern medicine is also unnatural and invasive. Pretty much all of it. Now, that doesn’t mean I want to live in a world without advanced surgery. Quite the contrary. But I believe most surgeons would advise doing what you could to avoid lying on their tables. Natural is better, but if nature fails (as it often does), surgery may well save you. That doesn’t seem to be the attitude that these folks (many of them very much concerned with their overall health, I’m sure) are taking towards pregnancy.
Have you seen what Apple’s new corporate HQ is going to look like?
I think by-gone era sci-fi is what they are going for.
Misthio, lol. I saw that, and thought it was pretty cool, despite looking like some kind of flying saucer.
Misthio, I don’t particularly care about a small subset of people at these two companies. I think that the benefit in general, however, reflects a general trend in society, esp. among higher achieving, very intelligent women. I think those women should be procreating. That’s likely a more fulfilling life for them, and more important for the future of humanity. But feminism has convinced them that being corporate shills is super! I can tell you from personal experience that it stinks in reality.
I dislike any architecture that’s designed only to look cool from the sky.
From ground level, it looks like a pretty standard, boring, generic, corporate structure.
I believe the argument is that if we erase all boundaries, then we have no direction. That should be taken very seriously.
Absolutely. One uses a hammer. One does not pursue a hammer. At least, a normal person does not.
Putting all of real life on hold so that one could pursue a hammer would be a silly life indeed.
We’re talking about Apple and Facebook, and we’re talking about people who have spent a serious amount of time and money getting degrees in things like computer engineering and business administration. These are not “normal” people. These are outliers.
Misthio, I don’t think female college graduates are outliers. There are millions of them in America. And, we’re producing more of them than male college graduates, aren’t we?
These are some of the leading companies in the country, and what they do may become standard across the board.
Such features tell you for whom the structure is really designed.
Not in computer science, engineering, and business administration.
Women are far more likely to choose fields of study where the eventual work environment is more amenable to taking years off to raise children.
Graduate degrees that lead to government jobs, for example.
Misthio, aren’t there more female than male law and medicine graduates these days? I’m sure there’s still a big gap in the sciences and engineering, but does that extend to business school? I’d be surprised, if so.
Plus, not everybody who works at Apple is an engineer. They have plenty of high-level jobs in other fields that might be more female dominated.
Bottom line: I don’t think the trend away from women having families is small or isolated. You can see it many stats: out-of-wedlock birth rate (over 40%!), lower (or no) population growth among college educated whites, the percentage of single women constantly increasing, the age of the average mother of a newborn rising, the percentage of married couples with no children rising, etc.
The top-three employers in the US are the Department of Defense (3.2 million employees), Walmart (2.1 million employees), and McDonalds (1.9 million employees).
Apple Computers employs 98,000 people.
Facebook employs 7,185 people.
They are outliers.
They’re elite companies in a profoundly lefty cultural environment. Setting aside the fact that a company that employs 100,000 people is massive, I believe these two companies are on the leading edge of a what will become a trend in employee benefits, which will only serve to accelerate the cultural phenomenon I identified in my last post.
I don’t understand what you are saying to me right now.
is that architecture a symbol of a fertilized egg? or a frozen egg? :)
You can’t stop people from believing a lie they have been told. They will have to experience it themselves. Clearly, these women believe that this opportunity is a benefit to THEMSELVES, and these days, that is what is important.
I’ve also learned you can’t stop stupid in others, you can only choose to avoid it for yourself.
but think how cool it will look on google-earth. oh, wait. wrong company.