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Mind The Gap: A woman advising other women about fertility choices? Oh the horror
Upasana Konidela advised a group of students at IIT, Hyderabad to focus on careers—and triggered a backlash.
She spoke about her own experience as an entrepreneur and mother—in that order. Upasana Kamineni Konidela was addressing a group of students at IIT, Hyderabad and happened to ask how many in the audience wanted to get married. More men raised their hands than women. “The women seemed far more career-focused!!!” she remarked on X (triple exclamation marks are hers not mine).
No surprises here but somewhere along the discussion, the grand-daughter of Apollo chairman-founder Prathap C Reddy veered into the option women have of freezing their eggs to delay having children while they focused on their careers. Freezing, she said, gives women the freedom to choose when to marry, when to have kids and to prioritise careers and financial independence.
Konidela is more than qualified to speak. Married at 27, she said she froze her eggs at 29, had her first child at 36 and is now expecting twins at 39.
Although Konidela insisted later that the issue was empowerment not privilege, freezing eggs is not exactly a routine or affordable choice for regular 9-5ers. The overwhelming majority of women who opt for it are not women who think to themselves: “Let me freeze a few eggs while I focus on getting that corner office.” It is those who want biological children but have not been able to conceive and, so, opt for in-vitro fertilization (IVF).
“There’s a lot of talk about egg freezing in the fertility space,” said Dr Parikshit Tank, co-founder, Pluro Fertility and IVF . “But the number of women who are coming forward to do this for reasons other than the inability to conceive in any other way is very, very small.” Also, he warned, “There are biological limitations. Even though one may have an egg, it may not always fertilize into an embryo.”
Backlash
Regardless of what you think about freezing eggs, which surely is the prerogative of individual women, the backlash and ugly misogyny faced by Konidela was over-the-top. It’s bad enough that a woman voices her opinion in public. It is intolerable that she – a woman who has frozen her eggs and chosen to have children at a time that works for her – should spread the message with such evangelical zeal. “You can choose when to get married, when you want to have kids on your terms, when you are financially independent,” she is quoted as having said.
A woman financially independent, in control of her fertility and body, telling other women that they can do it too? My god the patriarchy was not about to take this level of insubordination lying down.
The reaction was swift and brutal. Some accused her of promoting the hospital’s fertility arm. Others said she was “misguiding youth”.
Zoho founder Sridhar Vembu, divorced after three decades of marriage, also waded in. “I advise young entrepreneurs I meet, both men and women, to marry and have kids in their 20s and not keep postponing it,” he said. To do so, he added, was “their demographic duty to society and their own ancestors.”
Vembu is not the only man to have lectured women about their fertility responsibilities. In the recent past, the chief ministers of Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh, MK Stalin and Chandrababu Naidu have urged the women of their states to have more children to counter declining fertility rates. And in August, RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat too urged women to have at least three children.
Konidela’s response? She was happy to have sparked a healthy debate, she tweeted. Her intention was to empower women to make informed choices and she was—this was perhaps tongue-in-cheek—thankful “for your respectful responses”.
A larger conversation
Economists have long written about the “motherhood penalty”, or the impact on careers after women become mothers. With the birth of children, moms are more likely than dads to take a career break, seek flexible work options, be less open to long hours at the office, and less amenable to transfers. All of this impacts their careers, with promotions stalling, gender wage gaps getting larger and many, eventually, quitting jobs.
India’s female workforce participation is, notoriously, among the lowest in South Asia, despite the recent rise to 34.2%, driven by self-employed rural women. One of the primary reasons for this is the social conditioning that leaves women with the disproportionate burden of care work, which includes bringing up the children, cooking, cleaning and caring for the elderly, sick and people with disabilities at home.
Time use surveys establish that Indian women spend nearly 10 times more time than men on this unpaid care work. Obviously, there is a price to this: The more time women spend on unpaid caregiving inside their homes, the less time they have to work, paid, outside their homes.
Beyond fertility and freedom, the furore over Upasana Konidela’s comments led to no significant commentary on the care work burden on women or the need to distribute that load more equitably.
If women are to advance in their careers, more than freezing their eggs, what they need is for men to step up—not to lecture and harangue but to support. Motherhood need not be a career penalty. That it is, says a lot about society’s continuing expectations from women.
