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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
True, but that flip side is tiny compared to the masculinization of women. Femininity was always about fertility, maternality and domesticity, none of which are ever celebrated anywhere in our public culture any more. And pajama boy isn’t an expression of any of those things, just an anti-macho, neutered kind of filet-of-maleness. Contrast this with the explicit fawning celebration of women who do really masculine things, like trying to get onto the high school football team, driving a truck, or becoming a fighter pilot.
Well said. Look at what most men do for a living. They’re not all Fortune 500 CEOs, scientists, sports stars, senators, etc.
Work outside the home provided men with greater meaning when it was an explicitly masculine thing. Most men have an innate need to feel masculine, just as most women need to feel feminine; and men prefer feminine women and vice versa. That’s the nature of heterosexuality. There aren’t really any formally masculine roles left in Western society; and the only formally feminine role is pregnancy, which is a problem which feminists are just itching to solve. While egg-freezing doesn’t ultimately solve it, it seems to be an expression of that desire.
Exactly what is so smart about it? Once we have self indulged we will then have time for children…who probably won’t have siblings, grandparents, or the other things that come with a younger mom.
It is the idea that once a woman has self actualized in her own career, she will be able to step back and raise the perfect children with the perfect self actualized parent.
Sorry….but it doesn’t work on so many levels.
Younger mothers are also more likely to have friends with similarly aged children and can give each other advice. Better yet, younger mothers have single friends often willing to help babysit :)
What’s that saying again? Oh yes, “it takes a village to raise a child.”
Another chapter in the “having it all” book.
Children are not things like a new sofa, their care is more complex. Puppies and kitties are probably a better option for those thinking of that route.
I wouldn’t stop either the employer from offering, or the employee for taking them up on it, but if the story is trying to convince me it is a giant leap for women, kids, companies, what/whoever, it fails.