CGS-authored

If you have children under the age of ten (or know anyone who does), you know at least one person who’s bought an Elsa costume for Halloween. But what if you’re a person for whom the word “frozen” doesn’t trigger lyrics but a melody of anxiety in your head about when or whether you’ll ever have kids?

Apple and Facebook attempted to address that anxiety this week, when they announced that they would pay for female employees to freeze their eggs. We asked a group of experts to react to the news: Is this is an important step to narrowing the tech industry’s big gender gap and empowering its female employees? Or is it a misguided policy that could be used to pressure women into making an unsafe and uninformed decision?

Liza Mundy, Director of the Breadwinning and Caregiving Program:

Earlier this year the big tech firms issued (in some cases grudgingly) reports on the diversity and gender makeup of their workforces. When it comes to the inclusion of women they did not do well. Since then, some strategizing has...