What Do Women Need?

Better men. Until then, we'll freeze our eggs.

Photo by Olga Kudriavtseva on Unsplash

There’s an interesting article in the Guardian this week about the largest-ever anthropological study of women who freeze their eggs, and its conclusion is (to me at least) blindingly obviously, but still important: Women don’t freeze their eggs because they’re selfish careerists who want to climb the corporate ladder; women freeze their eggs because they want to have a child with a great partner, and one hasn’t yet come around. The issue, in other words, isn’t a too-demanding job; it’s what the study’s author calls a “mating gap.”

Inhorn’s research found that women freezing their eggs tended to be in their late 30s, successful high-earning professionals (in both the US and the UK, where it’s not usually covered by the NHS, it is prohibitively expensive for most) and primarily single. “They were one after another women who had been successful in their career and at the same time had been looking for a partner, but they just couldn’t find that reproductive partner.”

I wrote about this dynamic in my first book, for which I interviewed women who had frozen their eggs. At the time, big tech companies were starting to pay for egg freezing, and there was a minor freakout on some parts of the left that paying for egg freezing was part of some corporate plot to keep young women in the office instead of taking time off (and spending corporate money) to have kids. That smelled a lot like bullshit to me then, and it’s nice to see it confirmed. Very, very few women are saying to themselves, “I’ll freeze my eggs now so that I can continue to compete in a high-pressure corporate environment throughout my 20s.” More often, they’re in their 30s without a partner (or without a suitable parter), watching their reproductive window narrow, and deciding to take out the best insurance policy on offer.

But this isn’t a woman problem. This is a man problem.