So What, Who Cares (vol 1, issue 33) When a frozen egg is a workplace perk
The musical comedy duo Garfunkel and Oates got a show on IFC earlier this year, and the last two episodes centered around "Garfunkel" (i.e. Riki Lindholme) and her quest to freeze her eggs. In the final episode, it's made very clear that Lindholme's character is freezing her eggs because she hasn't found a partner with whom to make a baby the old-fashioned way, so she's quietly preparing for plans B-n. In real life, Lindholme, who is 35, froze her eggs last year; her musical parter Kate Micucci ("Oates") says she's following suit this year.
So when I read this morning that both Facebook and Apple will be subsidizing their female employees' egg freezing, my first thought was, "This is great news because it reduces the pressure to find a partner and get to popping out the kids."
My second was, "Free egg-freezing is going to be a great recruiting tool at a time when 'women in tech' is becoming a topic people pay attention to." While Facebook's self-reported demographic breakdown doesn't offer stats by age, it does offer stats by gender, and right now, women comprise only 15% of its tech workforce. At Apple, women comprise 20% of its tech workforce. Young women who want to make their bones at two marquee tech companies now know they're not racing to hit career milestones right as societal pressure to reproduce ratchets up.
So what? As critics were quick to say, the egg-freezing benefit can be used to bolster the argument that so long as women just plan everything out, they can have it all. Being able to freeze your eggs does not offset a workplace culture that does not allow for anything resembling work-life balance.
The timing is interesting, as this perk is coming to light right as more and more politicians are calling for the establishment of paid parental leave in the United States, and pointing out that our lack of paid leave for parents is handicapping our global standing. There's also an increasing drumbeat among business schools: pay attention to work-life concerns or risk losing access to a generation of talent.
It's worth noting that Facebook's most-publicized benefits are calculated to maximize the number of hours spent on campus and minimize the demands of domestic life. On the other hand: in 2013, the company was on record as offering $4,000 in ‘baby cash’ to couples who give birth or adopt, along with 16 weeks of maternity and/or paternity leave.
(On the other hand, while Apple was cited in 1989 as a mother-friendly workplace with on-site daycare, the company's benefits page makes no mention of that now. They do offer a childcare flexible spending account.)
Who cares? This employee benefit reflects a larger issue that is beginning to shape American society in substantial ways: the delay of marriage and parenthood among a very specific socioeconomic strata. College-educated women are getting married later and having their first child later. They're also much more likely to get married before having a child.
There has been a lot of ink spilled on what this financial windfall means for white-collar workers at two tech companies. Little has focused on how the phenomenon of an employer abetting long-term reproductive choices for their mostly white-collar workforce is taking place in the same year where employers across the U.S. have gone to court to avoid the federal mandate to cover their female employees' birth control, a decision that can have a significant effect on a working-class woman's finances.
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Not all infographics are created equal, as Buzzfeed's hilarious "11 Simple Charts to Help You Understand Celebrities" points out. The graphics are mostly silly and meant to demonstrate how unnecessary illustrations can be sometimes, but they point to an argument made by statistician Jeff Leek: When you crunch data without discernment, it's very easy to perceive correlations where there are none.
So what? Data journalism has taken off in the past few years -- and it doesn't hurt that graphics illustrating the journalism are easy to share via social media (Hello, website traffic!) But if the data set itself is not good -- or the person translating the data into a visual representation can't analyze it rigorously, you have a graphic that looks like something in that Buzzfeed round-up.
Who cares? It's a handy reminder that form does not convey legitimacy, i.e. just because something can be put in a chart, that is no guarantee it deserves to be in a chart. The person who writes a primer on infographic literacy for civilians will never lack for work on any professional-development circuit.
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Pop culture note of the day: You've heard me rave about Teri Agins' The End of Fashion and how it basically laid out the rise of fast fashion right before it engulfed America in a thousand Old Navy outlets. She's back with a new book -- Hijacking the Runway: How Celebrities Are Stealing the Spotlight from Fashion Designers -- and I am here to tell you that it's delightful.
Fans of Anne Helen Peterson's approach to celebrity journalism will appreciate the historic backstory Agins unfurls in the first chapters. Fans of celebrity gossip will love the little firecrackers Agins casually lights and lets drop between exhaustively reported accounts of how business shifts happen slowly, then all at once. Fans of fashion history will appreciate this analysis of the modern clothing market.
The rest of you? Oh, come on. Try it.
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Did you miss an issue of So What, Who Cares? The archive is here. Also, there is now a topic index that tells you what was in each issue. If you're like, "I remember there was an issue with otters in it, but when ...?" -- well, now you can find it. (It was September 24, btw.)
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