Frozen II : The Tech Industry’s Eggs
By Liza Mundy; Stephanie Stark; Jeff Gillis, Marcy Darnovsky; Brigid Schulte,
The Weekly Wonk
| 10. 16. 2014
[With CGS's Marcy Darnovsky]
If you have children under the age of ten (or know anyone who does), you know at least one person who’s bought an Elsa costume for Halloween. But what if you’re a person for whom the word “frozen” doesn’t trigger lyrics but a melody of anxiety in your head about when or whether you’ll ever have kids?
Apple and Facebook attempted to address that anxiety this week, when they announced that they would pay for female employees to freeze their eggs. We asked a group of experts to react to the news: Is this is an important step to narrowing the tech industry’s big gender gap and empowering its female employees? Or is it a misguided policy that could be used to pressure women into making an unsafe and uninformed decision?
Liza Mundy, Director of the Breadwinning and Caregiving Program:
Earlier this year the big tech firms issued (in some cases grudgingly) reports on the diversity and gender makeup of their workforces. When it comes to the inclusion of women they did not do well. Since then, some strategizing has...
Related Articles
By Matthew Rozsa, Salon | 09.15.2024
When a person with a uterus decides to freeze their eggs, any number of things can go wrong. Ice crystal can form, killing an otherwise viable ovum. A fertilized egg may fail to properly implant, or the egg may...
By Sarah Kliff, The New York Times | 09.09.2024
Image by Stephen Andrews from Unsplash
Yale agreed on Monday to pay dozens of patients who had filed lawsuits claiming that they had endured excruciatingly painful egg retrieval procedures after a nurse at its fertility clinic secretly swapped their anesthesia...
By Ari Schulman, The New York Times | 09.09.2024
There was immediate backlash when Alabama’s Supreme Court ruled in February that embryos created through in vitro fertilization qualified as children under the state’s wrongful death law. But it was a backlash as much from the right as from the...
By Megan Agnew, The Times | 09.15.2024
Faith Hartley always wanted two girls — a blonde and a redhead. “I thought, I’ll have one that looks like me,” says Hartley, 35, smoothing her golden hair in the Los Angeles valley home she shares with her husband, Neil...