Eggs and Apple

Eggs and Apple:

is the work place still no place for a woman?

Certain big companies (tech and otherwise) have made egg freezing available for young women who work for them (at a price).

In honesty I don't know if the companies really know why. It isn't so much that it isn't a good idea (younger eggs make stronger embryos with few problems). It is that the whole world of work is still a "man world" (this is historically ridiculous and inaccurate but by the Victorian era had become "fact". In an attempt to increase efficiency the whole notion of work was based on machines.) 

This idea still pervades our schools, higher education and "work" structure and ethic. The idea that time, how long you work for (in a measurable efficient way of course) and your quality (status, again in a quantifiable way), equates to your pay, and there for your "worth", continues to reduce, homogenize and belittle people (especially women and children). In this formula a woman is STILL paid less because her inherent assumed quality is less.

As a formula it would sit something like this. t x q = w

It is class and gender bias. If you start near the top your quality is perceived to to inherently of more worth than those beneath.

So how does this relate to eggs?

Well if you are a woman in the 21st Century, even in the Western "modern" world of tech, your "worth" comes down to your quality (how masculine you are perceived to be) and your time (how many hours do you put in).

This has meant that women in these companies and industries tend to have to carry one of two personas. "One of the boys" or "fem fatal". Mother's do not appear in general, mothering or being a mother is to "damaged" a woman. Mostly because it breaks the code of being the mysterious sexual aloof, or as "one of the guys" as possible.

This WHOLE system reduces people to parodies of themselves and everyone loses. If you can behave "like a man" (unemotional, detached, intellectually intelligent, swiftly decisive; though this is of course down to Victorian British ideals of masculinity) it is easier to work within these systems. 

The thing is, we are not machines.

We are complex animals that make systems and relationships with our space and each other. We are complicated eco-systems that affect each other deeply.

So when the question a young woman asks her self is: should I delay having children to further my career?

The question is not about why and how taking a year out in another deeply difficult and fulfilling field might altar her chosen path, it is about changing her status as a person within the company.

 

When the company answers: yes delay having children (at your cost) and further your career. 

The answer isn't about helping this woman get what she wants, it is about telling her who she needs to be in order to be respected.

The system it's self is so damaged and damaging that fails to see that it's solutions are actually part of the problem. From schools to Universities, with the ringing of bells (just like at the factory or clerks office) we have a system trying to make cogs.

Cogs. 

Yet we are people. Animals with hopes, dreams, and potential that is astounding given any kind of push. At some point the system will fail the you (and it will tell you that you failed the system) and discard you. For many people this is still while they are children. I know people who left school unable to write or hold a pen because he had ADHD and dyslexia (neither of which he was given any help with) and was given anger management instead. 

You don't make a good cog, discard. (Your quality is low, i.e. you do not fit the Victorian masculine ideal).

This work place system doesn't work. It still doesn't value human qualities. It has no place for compassion, deep communication, empathy, free creativity, long term sustainability. The women (and men) who don't work within this system, or struggle under it's misery daily keep being told "this is the way it is, it's getting better". Yet it is just patches, quick repairs for long term problems that only reinforce the idea that the Victorian male ideal for work, workers and the Great Machine. This is because the people at the top feel entitled to be there and have no interest in changing anything.

I believe that until we break this ideal (and I mean to bits) and adopt an more organic system like that of a forest, or ocean; women, and femininity still have little to no place in the modern work place. We are too shrill, too loud, to quiet, too emotional, too different. It isn't that we can't do the work, it isn't that we don't want to, it is just we still are seen as less the more feminine we are. And mothering is the most feminine thing we do.