Which comes first — the paycheck or the egg?

YOU might call this the mother of all controversies. Debate continues to rage over recent reports that companies like Apple and Facebook have offered to pay female employees up to $20,000 to freeze their eggs.

Supporters of the policy say it’s a perfectly sensible way of preventing women from leaving the workplace at a crucial point in their careers.

“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,” US-based journalist Katherine Rushton wrote in the UK Daily Telegraph.

“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,” she added optimistically.
TELL US: would you freeze your eggs if your employer paid you to do so?

Raw statistics reveal in super clear terms why US tech companies desperately need to attract and retain more women.

Only 26% of professionals in the computer and information field in the US are women, according to US Bureau of Labor data.

Meanwhile, women hold just 8.1% of the highest paying jobs in America, despite making up over half the total US workforce, according to the Center for American Progress.

[caption id=”attachment_25018" align=”aligncenter” width=”650"]

Freeze your eggs or freeze your career aspirations? That’s the unfair dilemma facing many women.[/caption]

But not everyone reckons a financial incentive to delay reproduction is the most elegant solution to a complicated problem. Harriet Minter, writing in The Guardian, said the big techies had totally missed the point.

“They lose women partly because the job-family juggling act that is now their life prevents them from giving the commitment necessary to make it to the board,” she wrote. “Apple may have paid lip service to this with longer parental leave, but that still doesn’t help women who have returned to work and and are trying to climb the ladder while being an at-least-half-present mother.

“By telling their female staff to hold off on having babies, these companies are demanding their employees put them before everything else, before their families, before their health.

“Rather than saying, ‘have your children in your own time and we’ll support you with well-paid parental leave and subsidised childcare’, they’re saying, ‘work really hard through your most fertile years and then when you may not be able to have kids anymore, you can give it a shot with the eggs we froze for you as a perk’.”

Here in Australia, most women seem to see it that way too. Here are two comments on the Facebook page of women’s site Mamamia. Both comments attracted plenty of “likes”.

There was this:

“This is taking IVF and all the hard work into getting it to this stage down the gurgler. I’m sorry but it is a choice to postpone having children. If you want them and can have them naturally why would you choose such a risky and invasive option. Instead why don’t the tech giants use the money towards subsidised childcare.”

And this:

“It’s very high risk . . . the chance of frozen eggs turning into live births is low. Why don’t the companies subsidise childcare for parents. It’s not just women who raise children after all.”

This seems to be the key issue here. Why not just direct the money and corporate goodwill towards work/life balance initiatives?

It should remembered in all of this that egg freezing is a physically demanding procedure involving hormone injections with only moderate success when it comes to conception. Indeed the New York Times reported that even the best fertility centres said a woman’s chance of pregnancy per embryo transferred to the uterus is between 30 and 50 per cent.

That makes this whole policy seem like a very roundabout way to improve the lot of women — if not an exploitative way.

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Uh-oh. There goes my statistical likelihood of ever achieving pay equity.[/caption]

Carolyn Leighton, who founded WITI, a network of women working in America’s tech sector, is certainly no fan.

“My phone has been ringing off the hook with women who found it insulting,” she told Business Insider. “They felt they were just trying to deflect the conversation about equal pay for women.”

That last comment might just be the most insightful of the lot. Apple and Facebook are both very good at public relations. They have now steered the conversation on women in the workplace to a place of their own choosing. That’s the first rule of PR: control the message.

People are now talking about whether funding oocyte-cryopreservation for professional women is ethical or not, or a good idea or not.

What they’re NOT talking about is why on earth aren’t there more women earning megabucks in these companies whose names aren’t Sheryl Sandberg?