Social Freezing Only Buys Childless Time While Working

The involvement of others in things that don’t primarily affect them is an anthropological constant. So it now makes sense that even Facebook and Apple announce a vision of whether and when working women should have children. Both companies support their employees with up to U.S. $20,000 (15,800 euros), provided that they opt for removal and preservation of their ova.

This should allow young women above all to fully concentrate on the job without getting in a last minute panic or getting wrapped up between the office and a baby. Though this so-called “social freezing” may still require some getting used to, it is not new. The father of the birth control pill, Carl Djerassi, had predicted such a development 14 years ago — and predicted recently in the “world” that public acceptance of this method, similar to in vitro fertilization, would only be a matter of time.

From the currently still difficult to digest frozen foods would thus come a normal form of family formation in a few years — and the liberating certainty, with a small operation, to be able to overcome their own age, their careers and the gender gap in the crushing decision between child and career.

In Silicon Valley, the latter is especially necessary; the quota of women at Apple and Facebook is on average about 30 percent. The suspicion is that the brashly colorful world of Californians, where conference rooms look like game rooms, is still not particularly family-compatible.

And it is only natural that women don’t want to compromise any longer, only because biological imperatives have dictated their actions for centuries, and because they want to determine for themselves the order of professional and personal self-realization to use reproductive medical possibilities without needing to muster five-figure sums to do so. However, this newfound freedom is an illusion at best — and at worst a case of repression.

Facebook and Apple like to talk and act like the workplace avant-gardes of the world, but feminist welfare organizations they are not. If these companies are willing to pay such substantial sums, then by no means do they wish to support a family foundation — otherwise, the premium could be paid out as a diaper subsidy. Rather, the intent is to buy childless time.

Whether the “Right” Time Ever Comes?

Employees without commitments can work more overtime, they are rarely bleary-eyed, their creative potential is not completely exhausted by afternoons spent crafting at their child’s Montessori school, and they never come down with chickenpox nor request a divided work schedule, nor in-company child care. Thus the investment in pregnancy postponement may well be worth it — especially since it suggests to women that procreation is not a problem; it just can’t happen right now.

But the “career instead of child” decision, and that is the irony, with this step — at least temporarily — will occur again. It is the curse of flexibility, as it has already been described by Richard Sennett in “The Culture of New Capitalism”: Long-term goals that determine the resume that ultimately define a person are sacrificed for the needs of the economy. And whether the thawing of oocytes actually works, whether the subsequent pregnancy will go well, or whether the “right” time will ever come, no one can guarantee.

Each rung that a woman has climbed in the career ladder makes the potential drop in achievement caused by parental leave even greater. That assumes that such a climb takes place at all. By freezing of oocytes, motherhood is not excluded but only postponed — and thus also the fundamental problem of being able to assert oneself as a mother in a leadership position. Conversely, there are also no guarantees that a hasty preservation of ova is actually recognized in mostly male-dominated boardrooms as a measure beneficial to a career.

Housewife as a Pre-Feminist Relic

The statement from Facebook and Apple that the controversial financing was the innate desire of the staff is interesting. This picture fits in quite well since Facebook CEO Sheryl Sandberg, herself a mother of two children, has demanded more feminine willpower in her 2013 book “Lean In.”

At a time in which the kid question mutates into public concern and the housewife is a pre-feminist relic, one could assume that ova preservation might actually be a thing for a woman: to hedge against immense social pressure, not to permanently defend either due to lack of family or career stagnation. This would explain the silence of men, who aren’t so simply affected by this dilemma.

The freezing solution to the child-career conflict would thus be an illusion, but at least the staff kept a large amount of sovereignty over their reproductive plans. How different the worst case scenario might appear can already be read in bestsellers such as Dave Eggers’ “The Circle,” where the writer creates the scenario of an Internet company that succumbs to totalitarianism. Such a dystopia is not so far removed from our time.

Even at the end of the ‘70s, medium-sized businesses offered the position of right-hand man to the boss to their distinguished staff — if they committed themselves not to have children so soon. Currently, such an immoral offer would be bad for company image. What has survived, however, is the pronounced interest in loyalty of employees.

Therefore, you don’t need much of an imagination to think how it would be if a company took advantage of company-financed freezing only for those women who would make such a decision — and how those who refused would be relegated to the sidelines. More dramatically formulated: any woman who will not preserve her ova should forget about her career.

Yet a Greater Anthropological Constant

Of course, this mode of pressure would mean a commitment to all subtleties, because outwardly the company supports the, yes, timeless desire of their employees to have children. But that only promotes those who allow themselves to adapt and freeze, and word would get around quickly. And so develops a disciplinary power in Foucault’s sense, as such employees could hardly be perfidious.

Even now, any young Facebook employee is hard pressed to decide, in case she may want to start a family. And those who accept the “social freezing” offer? They run the risk of being considered “workaholics who want children” by the company.

And in order for women to stick with such a label, the quarrel isn’t only with the dilemma of motherhood and career, but to have to justify this quarrel to others — still an anthropological constant which one could well do without.