A trap or a life-changing opportunity? - Employers offer to freeze eggs

It’s barely more than 40 years since a woman had to surrender her job in the public service or a bank when she got married. 

It’s hardly 50 years since women were not allowed to sit on a jury. Neither could a woman, in the disco-coloured 1970s, collect her children’s allowance without her husband’s permission — it had to be her husband because gender-neutral partners had not been invented.

In reality, women in Irish society four or five decades ago were almost closer to the hidden, silent and more or less interned women of extreme Islam today than they are to the Irish women of today. The transition is not by any means complete, nor has it been by any means perfect, but it has made this a far better society and a far better place to be a woman whether working inside or outside the home.

Imagine then trying to explain to those 1970s women, women whose lives followed a pretty rigid pattern unless they had the courage and energy needed to challenge the orthodoxy agreed between Church and State, that employers are offering to help pay for female employees to freeze their eggs so they can concentrate on their career. Imagine trying to explain to those stay-by-the-sink women that motherhood was a lifestyle choice to be deferred until it might not trip up professional ambitions. An obligation made optional.

US media giants Apple and Facebook, the very epitome of the digital age, have offered to help put the biological clock on hold for female employees. The gesture can either be seen as corporations taking an interest in their workers’ health or a cynical attempt to get 15 productive, committed and uninterrupted years from the women before life — and more importantly, work— is complicated by relationships, children or disruptive maternity leave.

Whether the offer is empowering or enslaving depends on your world view but it seems, no matter how loudly you might cheer for equality, advancement and a person’s right to choose, to veer pretty close to supporting corporate objectives rather than a positive, enriching realignment of the work/life balance. It is not quiet China’s one-child policy but it is certainly one of those only-in-America ideas.

It is difficult to imagine that a European company, certainly not a Scandinavian one, would make such a proposal but then those societies have childcare programmes that support families no matter how they are configured or how they are committed to careers. Those nations seem more like cultures where business and work serve society whereas in America that relationship almost seems the reverse.

The frozen eggs issue though is a chance to look at how we support parents torn between work and family and ask if we do enough to make offers like Apple’s and Facebook’s irrelevant. This conversation has been going on for years but we are no closer to having an alternative to league-topping childcare costs. And with the pay-back demands and the me-me lobbying before this week’s budget still ringing in our ears it is hard to think we ever will because we have still to understand how supportive, reliable, inclusive and accessible social services are a hallmark of civilised society.