女人会为了事业冷冻卵子？不可信

2014年，Facebook和苹果等公司表示，将会支付女性员工冷冻卵子的费用。消息一经传出，便迅速引起了抵制。

根据《财富》记者雷·加拉格尔当时的报道，批评者认为这项新福利是“鼓励女性忽视生物钟，从而在三十多岁时加倍努力工作的自私举动。这种行为充满家长式作风，涉嫌性别歧视，是让女性避免生育、活在办公室里的诡计，却打着关爱女性生育问题的旗号” 。

不过针对在美国和以色列的八家医院冷冻卵子的150名女性的研究发现，超过90%的受访者表示，她们无意因为学业或职业生涯而推迟生育。此举只是为了保留自己的生育能力，因为她们还没有结婚对象。这些女性还没找到生命的那一半，所以将卵子冷冻看作为寻觅伴偶争取时间的手段。

研究报告的第一作者、耶鲁大学人类学和国际事务教授玛西亚·因霍恩表示：“媒体讲述的故事一直是职场女性为了职业生涯而推迟生育年龄。”她说，这是错误的。“她们希望结婚，或至少（在生育之前）有个对象，只是现在还没有找到这个人。”本周在日内瓦举行的欧洲人类生殖与胚胎学会会议上，她对这份尚未发表的报告进行了展示。

一次卵子冷冻的价格大约为1万美元，这还不包含储藏费用。此外，女性一般至少要接受两次卵子冷冻，才能获得足够数量的卵子。

接受研究的女性大都接受过高等教育，超过80%的受访者至少拥有本科学历。因霍恩猜测，她们找不到对象的原因可能是“不平衡的大学毕业率”。比起男性，女性获得学士或更高学位的数量更多。

美国国家教育统计中心2017年的报告发现，自2000年以来，25至29岁的女性获取各级学位的比例都高于男性。去年，这种性别差距在学士学位及以上是8%，在硕士学位及以上是4%。

2015年的著作《约会经济学》深入讨论了找到合适配偶背后的数学问题。作者乔恩·伯格写道：“大学和毕业后的约会文化，受过大学教育的女性的结婚率降低，以及条件出色的单身男性结婚意愿不足，都是不平衡的性别比和受过高等教育的男性数量不足的副产品。”

因霍恩表示，解决这种失配的办法之一就是“让男孩有一个更好的起点”，让更多男性接受高等教育。不过更全面的方案可能是更新性别角色，以及对于男性和女性各方面的期待。（财富中文网）

译者：严匡正

When companies like Facebook and Apple said in 2014 that they would start covering the cost of egg freezing for women, the backlash was swift.

As Fortune's Leigh Gallagher reported at the time, critics derided the new benefit as "a self-serving move to encourage women to take their eye off the biological clock so that they could double down and work harder throughout their 30s. It was paternalistic, sexist, and a trick to keep women childless and living at the office, all wrapped in the cloak of concern over women’s fertility issues."

But a new study of 150 women who had undertaken elective egg freezing at eight clinics in the United States and Israel found that more than 90% said they were not intentionally postponing their fertility because of education or careers. Rather, they were preserving their fertility because they were single without partners to marry. Women lamented the “missing men” in their lives, viewing egg freezing as a way to buy time while they continued to search for a committed partner.

"In the media, there's been this narrative that career women are putting off having children for the sake of their careers," says Marcia Inhorn, the study's lead author and a professor of anthropology and international affairs at Yale University. That's incorrect, she says. "They want to be married or at least partnered [before having a child] and they haven't been able to find anyone." Inhorn's unpublished study was presented at the European Society for Human Reproduction and Embryology conference in Geneva this week.

A round of egg freezing costs approximately $10,000, plus storage fees, and women often need at least two rounds to collect the necessary number of eggs.

Women in the study were highly educated, with more than 80% having earned at least a graduate degree. Their failure to find a partner, Inhorn surmises, points to the "lopsided college graduation rate," in which more women are graduating from college and advanced degree programs than men.

A 2017 report from the National Center for Education Statistics found that since 2000, degree attainment rates among 25- to 29-year-olds have generally been higher for females than for males at each education level. The gender gap last year for students in that age range was about 8 percentage points for bachelor's degrees or higher and 4 percentage points for a master's or higher degree.

In the 2015 book Date-Onomics, which delves into the math behind finding a suitable mate, economics writer Jon Birger writes: “The college and post-college hookup culture, the decline in marriage rates among college-educated women, and the dearth of marriage-material men willing to commit, are all byproducts of lopsided gender ratios and a massive undersupply of college-educated men."

One way to resolve this mismatch is to "get boys off to a better start" so more of them attain higher education, Inhorn says. But a more comprehensive solution may be to update gender roles and what's expected of each sex across the board.