Earlier in the week, Apple and Facebook each revealed a new perk for their female employees: egg freezing and storage. Positioned as a way to recruit and retain 20- and 30-something women, the
up-to-$20,000 ovoid-based bennie offers a path of reproductive management allowing for optimal nose-to-the-grindstone job dedication during those crucial years when fertility and career-building
intersect.
To me, it sounded straight out of The Onion.
As it turns out, the news of this Brave New World-ish move nearly broke the satirical daily. Onion editors quickly put up some
fake person-in-the street-style photos, with quotes underneath that were more obvious, and true, than actually funny. For instance, they had a middle-aged male “art appraiser”
asking, “What about the women who want to have kids now? Do they at least get offered a decent severance package?”
Indeed, what if you already have a demanding job, and you
start feeling pressure around the office not to be an icky, inconvenient “breeder”? What if you happen to get pregnant, because, um, you want to have both a family and a career at the same
time? Or perhaps you don’t feel like putting yourself through the uncomfortable process of extracting eggs when the success rate is still murky? (That’s why two go-rounds are
included at both companies.)
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And, if you do become “with child” the old-fashioned way, will you have to wear a scarlet A on your chest, (for “Antifreezer!”) and
risk getting sent to a home for wayward career women?
What if you get laid off? You can carry your cardboard file box out the door, holding your sad plant and your rolled posters, but then you
have to worry about boxing up and moving your eggs, too (at least metaphorically) -- especially if unemployment lasts past your Cobra. Will you have to cut corners and find a cut-rate egg storage
plant?
When the whole process becomes normalized, will corporations like ad agencies actually end up bringing the whole operation in-house, for cost-saving reasons? Will “egg
retrieval” rooms start appearing next to nap rooms? Eventually, will those heavy doors of the gleaming stainless steel refrigerators in thousands of work kitchens open to reveal rows of
ovoid-filled beakers labeled Jen 1, Jen 2, Jen 3, Hannah, Molly, Alex, Serena, Cate, Becky, Rachel. Georgia, and Jess.
And what if you turn out to be one of the lucky ones, and despite having
no time for a social life, you defy the odds, and find a mate, and you retrieve your eggs and have a successful pregnancy at 50? Does that mean you’re out to pasture? After all ,
you’ve lost your youthiness, and now you’re just another used uterus in the work force, who can’t be available 24/7.
I joke. Certainly, life is messy, and there’s no
perfect answer. It can’t hurt to have the option. After all, the whole process started for enlightened medical reasons, as a way for younger women with cancer to retain their fertility choices
after chemo treatments. And, women who have trouble getting pregnant and require IVF treatments will be mighty grateful for the coverage of two rounds.
Still, it immediately reminded me
of “The Handmaid’s Tale” by Margaret Atwood. This is an incredibly prescient dystopian novel written in 1985, in which a religious dictatorship takes away all women's rights and
starts classifying women according to their levels of fertility.(“Unwomen” are sterile, or widows, feminists, lesbians, nuns, and political dissidents.) And the high-status wives
of leaders have young and fertile “handmaids” to carry and birth their babies for them.
Tech companies are not repressive theocracies. (Well, they do preach the religion of the
digit.) And while egg-freezing is intended to be a benevolent move that helps level the gender field, it will result in lots of bizarre stratifications.
What I find most troubling is the
arrogance of these companies wanting to engineer an answer rather than doing the hard and frustrating work of “getting it.” That means making room for and valuing women as humans who
rightly deserve to be 50% of the work force. These are human needs, not just female ones. Really, the punishing standard of the 80-hour work week is untenable, not macho. It’s a recipe for
burnout that can’t be sustained for non-machines in the long run, no matter how much free food and dry cleaning come with it.
I know that egg-freezing is just one part of a Facebook
package that now includes “baby money” and more maternity and paternity leave. That’s great. Paternity leave is something that benefits all human beings. So would on-site child
care, sick-child care, flex schedules, job sharing, transparent payrolls, and on and on.
Recently, Satya Nadella, who this year took over for Steve Ballmer as head of Microsoft, got in hot
water for what was seen as his dismissive (if not arrogant and sexist) answer to a question about how female employees should go about asking for pay raises. At a conference called (and
you can’t make this up) “The Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing,” he responded: "It's not really about asking for the raise, but knowing and having faith that the system
will actually give you the right raises as you go along.” He added that not asking for a raise was “good karma.”
Nadella later apologized and said he’d been
“inarticulate.” He said he “wholeheartedly supported programs” to close the pay gap for women.
And indeed, in many of these companies, you have to leave and take a new
job in order to get a raise.
But that’s where the ineffable male privilege gap shows up, especially in tech. You can’t rely on karma for getting paid the same as your male
counterpart, who started out higher than you. Nor can you rely on karma forfinding your mate or reproducing at the right time, when you won’t be considered a drag on the numbers for your
boss.
Unless guys like Nadella go through some sensitivity training, they will still have no clue about all the invisible barriers for women in getting and keeping their jobs, and ascending
the corporate ladder.
The number-one barrier is not having enough women there to begin with who are role models, have navigated these issues, and can advocate for others.
So it becomes
a chicken and egg thing. Don’t get me started.