OPINION
WHEN I read the news that Apple and Facebook are now paying up to
$20,000 for female employees to freeze their eggs, I had the distinct
impression I was meant to react by dancing gleefully with my girls,
high-fiving each other and generally whooping it up, as in a yoghurt or
soap commercial.Work-life balance? No longer a problem! Fertility? Oh-ho-ho, NAILED IT!
Except, no. No, to this news. No, to companies trying to get women to bargain away their biological clock in exchange for keeping their noses to the grindstone, never leaving the office because “Who cares? Time is on my side!”
This latest offering from Apple and Facebook is a devil’s deal in the guise of a gender equity perk. What a truly terrible idea this is, and what a weird, cynical message it sends to women.
First off, a few disclaimers: I am very pro-single woman. I was one until very recently.
I don’t like articles that try to make women feel afraid they’ll never have kids, and I don’t like these same women being told, either implicitly or explicitly, that they are somehow Less Than because they don’t have a husband or family.
I am an advocate of women finding and following their own path.
If women think they’d like to have kids but haven’t yet met the right person, I am absolutely in favour of them taking steps to potentially protect their fertility while gaining some much-needed calm at the same time.
But I’m also interested in scientific fact, and not preying on women’s insecurities while selling them the idea that egg-freezing is somehow the great feminist panacea.
Because companies don’t really care about their employees’ fertility — they care about getting their employees to work. Your fertility, in turn, does not really care that much about your career.
‘There’s no point in encouraging
women to delay having babies if you’re just going to make it hell for
them in the office once they actually have them’
Source: ThinkStock
That’s because the event apparently underplayed what is possibly the biggest takeaway about egg freezing, which is that, currently, the results are far from guaranteed.
According to the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, when a woman 38 or younger freezes her eggs, the chance of one frozen egg yielding a baby is between 2 and 12 per cent.
As women get older, the pregnancy rate per frozen egg drops even further.
I think most women who opt for egg-freezing — including those who might choose to do so due to an illness — know that it’s not a sure thing. But when companies start paying for these treatments, it creates a strange, “Big Brother”-esque link between work and personal life.
These procedures are expensive — $10,000 per session, not including the costs of storage. Women who freeze their eggs in their 20s have a greater chance of a successful pregnancy later on. So if companies want to pay an amount of money that would be unaffordable to many young women, what’s the problem?
The problem is the unspoken trade-off — that once fertility has been neatly taken care of, you are free to work, work and then do some more work. When in fact, it is all this work that makes it hard for so many of us to pursue meaningful personal lives in the first place. Until we address the problem of overwork, these types of perks are just symbolic window dressing.
Relationships don’t just magically happen after you check off all your other goals. Life is messy.
Sometimes everything happens all at the same time, and that’s fine.
Apple are one of the companies to introduce egg freezing.
Source: AFP
Facebook does have several family-friendly policies in place, including paternity and maternity leave and opportunities to work from home, in addition to giving new parents $4,000 worth of “baby cash.” Other firms are likely to follow suit in the so-called “perk war” to attract talent, and may add egg-freezing to their list of covered benefits.
But I’d hope they pay attention to those other perks and consider new ones, as well: opportunities for part-time work (which saves companies money, yet is still something many firms are very slow to embrace), telecommuting, flexible end-start times, job-share programs, and more.
That’s in addition to promoting an office environment in which people do good work and go home — paid maternity/paternity leave is great, but it means little if you’re expected to work 60 hours once you go back to the office.
Often, these policies make the difference between a woman staying at work and dropping out, convinced she can’t do it.
And while Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg is to be congratulated on the contributions she’s made to the conversation about working women, there were many parts of her book Lean In that made it seem like families were an obstacle to the real goal at hand: doing more work. (Indeed, a 2012 analysis by the site Glassdoor reported that the biggest gripe of Facebook employees was the long hours.)
Sheryl Sandberg.
Source: Supplied
There’s no point in encouraging women to freeze their eggs if your office encourages a schedule so punishing that there’s no time for men or women to date.
And there’s no point in encouraging women to delay having babies if you’re just going to make it hell for them in the office once they actually have them.
The freezing facts: What to know before you chill
• The egg-freezing process is similar to the first part of in vitro fertilisation, with 10 to 12 days of daily injections and multiple visits to the doctor’s office for ultrasounds and blood tests.
• A woman then undergoes a 15 to 30 minute outpatient procedure under light anaesthesia to retrieve matured eggs. The usable ones are frozen.
• Egg-freezing is not generally recommended for women over the age of 38.
• In women younger than 38, the success rate is 2 to 12 per cent per frozen egg.
• Doctors recommend that a woman have at least 20 eggs extracted (in two sessions).
• Egg freezing costs about $10,000 per session, plus $500 per year in storage (some companies offer the first year of storage free).
This story originally appeared on the New York Post
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