Tech Companies Need to Hack Workplace Culture, Not Female Biology
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Tech Companies Need to Hack Workplace Culture, Not Female Biology

Paying for women to freeze their eggs won't level the playing field.

Facebook and Apple's latest headline-grabbing staff perk is to pay for female employees to freeze their eggs. NBC reported on the new cryopreservation benefit at the Silicon Valley corporations, which it said appeared to be the "first major employers to offer this coverage for non-medical reasons."

You could see this as an empowering message to women that having a career in tech doesn't have to mean forfeiting a family life. Or you could see it as an alarming incentive for women to keep working as long as possible, without letting such trivial things as biological fertility get in the way. Either way, one thing's for sure: egg-freezing isn't going to level the playing field for women in tech.

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Don't get me wrong, the egg-freezing perk is a good little bonus on the whole. Fertility declines rapidly in women after the age of 35 as their eggs decrease in quality, and freezing eggs can relieve this time pressure. Having this opportunity gives women more choice when it comes to family planning—another option if they're not ready for kids when the biological clock chimes loudest. While it seems unlikely many will make use of the perk, the few that do will no doubt appreciate their employer picking up the bill.

What's more, Apple and Facebook (among other tech giants) are known for having generous maternity and paternity benefits that go beyond legal requirements. Facebook, for instance, reportedly offers both mothers and fathers four months of paid leave, plus a casual $4,000 at the birth or adoption of a new child. That's good.

EGG FREEZING IS NOT GOING TO BE THE GREAT LEVELLER

But if tech companies want to attract more women into the industry—which diversity reports have shown remains depressingly white and male—there are deeper, cultural issues to address. Egg freezing is not going to be the great leveller.

For a start, as Business Week's Emma Rosenblum points out, it's an invasive and often heartbreaking procedure that few women opt into lightly. It's not as simple as just putting your fertility on hold at your boss's convenience, even if you wanted to.

In any case, unless women are going to start having children past retirement, they'll still need to fit a pregnancy and child into their working life at some point, which is where the real difficulties kick in.

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To really work on closing that gender gap, tech companies—hell, most all companies—need to address some fundamental aspects of workplace culture, not of biology. Because the evidence suggests that when it comes to career and family, you still can't have it all. Unless you're a man.

The Guardian's Siri Srinivas points to a recent CUNY study that demonstrated this disparity in terms Silicon Valley types may best understand: cold hard cash. It found that, on average, women with children earned dramatically less than men with children between 1990 and 2010.

No huge shock there, given that women generally earn less than men. But what was most interesting was that, up to the age of 65, men with children earned significantly more than men without, but the same wasn't true for women. The researchers called this the "mommy tax" and "daddy bonus."

Overall, it's clear that, career-wise, motherhood is more of a burden on women than fatherhood is on men.

You still can't have it all. Unless you're a man

Actually conceiving and giving birth—with fresh or frozen eggs—is just the start of the conflict between family life and work life. To truly address the disproportionate impact parenthood has on women, you need to consider the whole package.

In the immediate aftermath of the birth, there are obvious reasons women need to take some time off when they're having a baby. Childbirth is no coffee break pursuit, and not every career woman is Marissa Mayer. Until the transhuman future of artificial rent-a-wombs become reality, mothers are necessarily more burdened by actual physical pregnancy than men—and even if technology breaks past that, we can probably expect social attitudes around which sex should be taking care of a newborn to endure.

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Really, there's no reason fathers shouldn't be capable of caring for a new child, and no reason they shouldn't have an equal opportunity to do so—just as women should have an equal opportunity to return to work. The reason this generally doesn't happen, of course, is less about logistics and productivity and more about social pressure.

One way to help redress that balance in the early days of parenthood is to offer paternity leave equal to maternity leave, as Facebook does. Many tech companies offer leave for new fathers that, while generous compared to the status quo, is significantly less than their maternity leave, which means mothers are likely to end up playing the main childcare role from this early stage. And even when men have the option to take time off, studies have shown that uptake of paternity leave generally lags far behind that of women. The burden remains unequally distributed.

Once a woman returns to work, the balancing act between family and career starts in earnest

Even if the parental leave issue is deftly navigated, children don't grow up in even the most generous 17 weeks of paid leave. Once a woman returns to work, the balancing act between family and career starts in earnest.

Earlier this month, Kieran Snyder collected experiences from hundreds of women in tech for a story in Fortune, and found that many decided to leave the tech industry after becoming mothers, often citing inflexible work arrangements, an unsupportive work environment, and difficulties sorting out childcare as pushing them into staying at home.

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NY Mag's Kat Stoeffel notes that Facebook offers an on-site day care—for dogs, not children.

While perks for new parents are great, an understanding of the requirements of parents from that point onwards is just as important, if not more so. A baby lasts a lot longer than the birth.

Of course, the disproportionate impact of parenthood on working women over working men is not unique to the tech world; the persistent assumption that women should shoulder most of the responsibility of parenting and prioritise family over work is a society-wide issue.

But if the tech industry really wants to be the one to buck the trend, it needs to focus more on fundamental cultural changes than one-off bonuses; long-term improvements that make the workplace more flexible for mothers and fathers alike.

Egg freezing might make women more suitable for the workplace. What's really needed is for the workplace to become more suitable for women.

xx is a column about occurrences in the world of tech, science, and the internet that have to do with women. It covers the good, the bad, and the otherwise interesting gender developments in the Motherboard world.