It’s March 31st and time’s (almost) up! Strangely, not a single man has showered me with tokens of gratitude. Is it too much to ask for my oppressors to offer amends and praise my powerful, moving presence in their life?
I find it especially bizarre that no men in academia have wished me a happy Women’s Heritage Month– even the guys in my discussion sections that claim to be allies. I guess they’re too embarrassed to face the facts, or maybe they just haven’t been keeping up with PubMed or The Economist…
I’ll woman-splain it for you: the egg is far superior to the sperm. It’s already embarrassing that those swimmers need to bring along millions of their siblings for the off-chance they’ll get some, but even past self-esteem, eggs are serving higher returns. You can get around $125 for an entire sperm sample that will likely contain at least 40 million squigglies. That makes a single sperm worth about a whopping .000003125 dollars – and this is me being generous.
On the ova hand, donors get paid around $8,000 for all their eggs from one cycle, and we strong, independent women lose ~1,000 eggs a cycle. Our bodacious babes are $8 a pop! Eggs and any hottie who identifies as a woman – regardless of reproductive ability – are 2.56 MILLION times better than semen. We already knew this (being omniscient and all), but now we have the numbers to shove in our sexist classmates’ faces.
I’m sure men’s-rights activists will use this pay gap as an example of their underprivileged status in America, but I still like to see this as a win for the ladies. So go enjoy the rest of our month (even though every day is egg supremacy day) and give those top-of-the-line baby-makers a lil’ love.
Image via Grace Kim