Selfish career-driven women. Gullible dupes of the fertility industry. Victims of the patriarchy. When leading anthropologist Marcia C Inhorn first embarked on her decade-long study of why women freeze their eggs, the popular narrative was largely one of derision.
“There was a lot of either blaming women or saying that they’re naïve, stupid and so forth,” says the Yale professor, from a red armchair in her home in New Haven, Connecticut.
Meanwhile, in academic circles, egg freezing was – and still is – often seen as a calculated act by women to hack their fertility by prolonging it through medical intervention, “as if this was something very intentional that women were doing in this kind of planned, almost feminist, narrative”, says Inhorn.
This argument was so compelling that it formed one of her initial hypotheses: “Is it career and educational aspiration that’s driving the turn to egg freezing?”
But when she started speaking to women, it became almost immediately clear that in fact it was something – or someone – else driving the globally expanding trend, which in less than a generation has gone from unheard of to, in some circles, almost ubiquitous.
More than 150 interviews later, her research – the largest anthropological study to date into why women freeze their eggs – concluded that it was men, not women, who were the problem. The biggest driving factor for women in the US was a shortage of suitable educated men, a problem which she terms in her forthcoming book, Motherhood on Ice, the “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.”
This, she says, reflects the growing gap between men and women going into higher education. In 2019, there were 28% more women than men in higher education in the US – and soon, it is projected, there will be two university educated women in America for every one university educated man. This, says Inhorn, has left a stark imbalance when it comes to finding an equal partner.
And this educational gap is not limited to the US. There are growing educational gender disparities in Canada and Europe – particularly in the UK.
The “men as partners problem”, says Inhorn, has been a discourse in international reproductive health circles for some time, but is usually talked about in relation to poorer countries: “It’s talked about for men in the global south, now we need to start talking about the men as partners problem for women in the global north.”
Many of the women Inhorn spoke to said they wanted an egalitarian relationship, which often meant finding someone with a similar level of education. But among those who did not object to partnering with somebody less educated, it still proved to be a problem because the men were often intimidated by the success of the women. Some women resorted to toning down their educational achievements on their dating app profiles to avoid putting men off, while others hired professionals to help them with their profiles.
“Sometimes men would joke or insult them about their jobs or say ‘you’re smarter than I am, I can’t go out with you’. I mean, just really blatant kinds of misogyny and discrimination,” she says.
While the women may have been socialised to believe they could have a career, a family and an equal relationship, she found the men had not necessarily been raised the same way. Partnership was not high on the priorities of the men – reluctant to commit and unready for fatherhood – who the women in her study were coming across.
Then there were those who simply didn’t want to. “I learned the term ‘the Peter Pans’, you know the men who will never grow up. They may be educated men who have money and so forth, but they want to play around and have a lot of fun and may not partner at all, or may not partner well into their 40s and 50s,” she says.
On a personal level, Inhorn, who is a mother of two but would have opted for egg freezing after getting divorced in her 30s had it been available, said the lack of progress in men’s attitudes since then is tragic.
“A lot of the people I went to graduate school with didn’t end up partnering, or they partnered in marriages that weren’t really very happy,” she says. “And what’s surprised me 30 years on is seeing the same kinds of partnership problems in this generation of women and trying to figure out: what’s gone wrong?”
The answer, Inhorn’s research found, falls into two categories. One is the “mating gap” and the other is what she describes as “reproductive waithood” – the state women are forced into by a lack of suitable male partners.
Of the 150 women she interviewed, 36 froze their eggs for medical reasons and the rest were healthy women who did so out of choice. All of the women who froze their eggs electively were cisgender. Three of the women were bisexual and 111 were heterosexual.
While she did not interview men for her study and says that she does not wish to portray them all as callous – there were many positive men in the lives of the women she interviewed, she says – almost invariably, the women’s stories of egg freezing were about men. So the book is “the views of men through women’s eyes”.
Her findings home in on the decline of men, which is a growing cause of alarm in the US, with books on the subject by Professor Scott Galloway, author of Adrift, and Jon Birger’s Date-onomics: How Dating Became a Lopsided Numbers Game. But, Inhorn says, this is also having a “deleterious effect on women’s lives”.
The rise of egg freezing, granting new freedoms to women who can afford to, has also played out amid devastating constraints on abortion in the US after the supreme court’s overturning of Roe v Wade.
Over time, Inhorn predicts, egg freezing for career-planning will increase among women in their mid- to late- 20s, but that partnership problems will remain a key driver.
The decision to freeze is fraught with difficulties, not least the cost. In January, the Observer reported on the UK’s fertility regulator’s calls for an urgent update to the law around egg freezing as rapidly growing numbers of women decided to go through the invasive procedure – often without being warned of the full financial, emotion or physical cost.
Clinics, experts claimed, were adopting “aggressive” marketing tactics, knowingly heaping on extra costs to a treatment that can cost tens of thousands of pounds, and not taking enough care of patients’ physical and mental wellbeing.
The government has since launched a consultation, which closed earlier this month, and the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority expects to submit its final recommendations this summer.
In her book, Inhorn writes that closing the gap between the genders will be a “critical policy challenge in the decades ahead”. But until society “fixes men”, egg freezing will remain the best reproductive option for single women in their 30s .
But in the meantime, she says, we should focus on celebrating women’s successes. “Women around the world are really doing amazing things in higher education,” she adds. “But unfortunately the downside of that is some men are not doing so well now and women are suffering for that.”
