Frozen Eggs and Title IX

This past fall, I gave a talk on work-and-family issues to a class of female students in the M.B.A. program at my university. As usual, in discussing the findings of the research my co-authors and I conducted for our Do Babies Matter? project at Berkeley, I mentioned the "baby penalty" that faces young women in fast-track professions. However, in the discussion that followed, a young woman volunteered a new topic — one that immediately captured all of our attention: "I need advice. I’m planning to freeze my eggs — it’s very expensive and the procedure, I hear, is painful. But I don’t see how I can plan a family until my career is going well."

She had barely finished when another student interjected, "You don’t know if it will work at all: The technology is still sketchy." Yet another chimed in, "I waited to have kids until I was 35. I thought I was young, but it was too late. It took five years to adopt."

For these young women, this was an ordinary conversation, much like one their mothers...