Unimaginable until the twentieth century, the clinical practice of transferring eggs and sperm from one person’s body to another individual’s body is now the basis of a multi-billion dollar fertility industry. But who provides the eggs and sperm, and how do they think about their involvement? To find out, I combined historical and statistical evidence with interviews of staff and donors at egg agencies and sperm banks. My findings highlight the role of gendered stereotypes in the day-to-day operations of the fertility business. Different rules apply to male and female donors, who experience the transactions very differently.

How Egg Agencies and Sperm Banks Do Business

Egg agencies and sperm banks recruit donors to give marketable reproductive cells. Most donors are motivated by the money, but the transactions are portrayed in highly gendered terms. Drawing on the stereotype of women as nurturing caregivers, egg agencies emphasize the plight of infertile couples in selecting women who want to “help” people by giving the “gift of life.” In contrast, sperm banks encourage men to earn money for an easy “job.” As one cheeky ad puts it: “get paid for what you’re already doing!”

America’s largest egg agencies and sperm banks receive hundreds of applications every month, so they can be picky. Medical evaluations are required for all potential donors, including a family health history going back three generations. Beyond that, gendered rules apply:

•  Egg donors must conform to rigorous height/weight ratios; sperm donors do not have to meet this standard, but must be at least 5’8” tall.

•  Women over thirty are unlikely to be accepted, but men can donate until they are forty.

• Fertility businesses require men (but not women) to be enrolled in college or have a degree.

• Most egg agencies require psychological assessments of how women feel about having biological children raised by others, but sperm banks do not require such discussions.

What Donors Do and Earn

Once accepted, egg donors and sperm donors create profiles to be posted in “donor catalogs” onprogram websites. To attract potential clients, fertility businesses strive for donor diversity along lines of race and ethnicity, religion, and even donor hobbies. Staffers complain about the difficulty of recruiting African Americans and Asian Americans, so such donors are considered particularly valuable. In a given sperm bank, all men are paid the same rate, usually around $75 or $100 per deposit. In contrast, some egg agencies will adjust a donor’s compensation based on her personal characteristics, including race. African American and Asian American egg donors can be paid a few thousand dollars more than whites. Fertility businesses will pay African American and Asian American female donors more than whites because of their desired characteristics.

Egg donors must inject themselves with powerful fertility medications for several weeks before undergoing outpatient surgery. Sperm donors have an easier time, but many people do not realize that they are usually required to donate once a week for at least a year. Screening donors is costly, so sperm banks have to make sure that men produce enough samples to cover costs. Yet neither biology nor technology explains why producing eggs for money is framed as a gift, while selling sperm is called a job.

How Men and Women Understand Their Donations

My interviews reveal that the language used by fertility businesses amounts to more than empty rhetoric; it shapes how men and women understand the exchange of sex cells for money.

• Egg agencies are constantly thanking women for the wonderful difference they are making in the lives of recipients – so egg donors speak with a great deal of pride about helping people have children. Some egg donors even described the money they received as a “gift” for the gift they had given.

• Sperm banks treat men more like employees who are expected to clock in on a regular basis – and sperm donors respond by calling the money “income” or “wages.” Tellingly, several sperm donors said they felt like “assets” or “resources” for the sperm bank. Egg donors did not use that sort of language, even though they are making much more money.

One of my most surprising findings is how donors think of their parental contributions. Sperm donors have a straightforward view of themselves as fathers, while egg donors insist they are not mothers! This is the opposite of what many might expect, given the “job” versus “gift” framings, plus the simple fact that women and men each provide half the genetic material for an embryo.

Different understandings of biological offspring make sense when we recall the emphasis egg agencies place on the ultimate recipients. Egg donors consider the recipient to be the “real mother,” because she is the one who will carry the pregnancy, give birth, and raise the child. Especially with modern technology, maternity is more easily separated into distinct tasks. The woman who provides the egg, the woman who carries the pregnancy, and the woman (or women) who rears the child – all can lay claim (or not) to the label of “mother.” Fatherhood is more often reduced to an equation in which sperm equals dad. Sperm donors, moreover, are not encouraged to think about the people who use their donations to become parents.

“How does it feel to have children running around out there?” Donors are often asked this question, and the responses from men and women are influenced not only by the sales pitches of fertility businesses, but also by longstanding cultural traditions. The ancient Greeks thought of men as providing the generative seed and women the nurturing soil, so they would recognize the messages spread by contemporary fertility businesses. Sperm donors think of their seed as essential, but downplay the role of the recipients in conceiving, gestating, and rearing the baby. Egg donors do just the opposite. Today’s donors and recipients of eggs and sperm are, in short, building on very old stereotypes to craft new definitions of motherhood, fatherhood, and family.

Low-income parents and parents of color have long demanded well-funded schools to provide their children with the same level of education as that provided for wealthy white children. Often the answer to their pleas is “no,” as educators, politicians, policy makers – even many people in the general public – claim that “money doesn’t matter” for school quality.

But the facts say otherwise, as spelled out in reports from the Annie E. Casey Foundation, the Center for American Progress, and other organizations that have compiled local school data from across the United States. In Massachusetts specifically, the top ten school districts whose students score highest on the Standard Aptitude Test spend an average of $16,010 per pupil, while the schools whose students score lowest spend an average of $13,799 per pupil. That’s a difference for each student of more than $2000 a year – approximately the same gap in school spending per pupil that separates U.S. states ranked in the top fifth versus the lowest fifth in terms of student performance on tests. The funding gaps between top-performing schools and states and the lowest performers are not a coincidence. Money matters.

What Good Funding for Schools Can Do

Money translates into tangible resources that make a real difference. Qualified and experienced teachers, laboratory equipment, attractive school grounds, heat and air conditioning, and buildings without asbestos, rats, and lead – all can be paid for with adequate funding. More money per pupil can also boost technological facilities, ensure more diverse and rigorous course offers, and pay for after-school and extracurricular activities that have been shown to be important to maintain student attendance and prepare youngsters for college and university admission. Students in underfunded schools without all these special resources do not perform as well academically as their peers in resource-rich schools.

It is not just a matter of resources either, because school children take messages from their surroundings about their own worthiness and life prospects. If they attend poorly resourced schools with crumbling buildings, overcrowded classrooms, barred windows, old textbooks, and
not enough desks and skilled teachers to go around, children realize that they are less valuable than other children who appear to go to nicer schools with better teachers and facilities. Schools should not convey discouraging messages that dash pupils’ dreams and aspirations from the start.

Why Funding Gaps Happen

Americans believe in equal educational opportunity, so why do glaring gaps in school resources happen? Resource inequalities happen because U.S. schools rely on fragmented and complicated funding arrangements. Local property taxes are the primary source of school funding, supplemented by various state and federal contributions. The United States is the only Western industrialized nation that funds its schools based on the value of the homes located nearby.

When economic times are good, the U.S. funding structure greatly boosts schools for children in living in wealthy districts. But in times of economic duress and fiscal pressures – such as we find ourselves in now – reliance on local property taxes hurts all schools and pupils. Obviously those living in lower-income neighborhoods always fare worst, yet when housing values decline, schoolchildren in wealthy, middle- and low-income districts alike suffer as property tax collections decline. A relatively well-to-do school district may react to dips in property tax collections by doing extra fundraising among parents, but this band-aid is not usually available for middle-class and low-income parents who are struggling to buy groceries, pay electric bills, and make mortgage payments.

Critics of purely local funding have long argued that government, not parents, should be responsible for equal and adequate educational funding. To compensate for uneven and often low property tax revenues, many states provide supplementary funding. But such state funds do not always work to fill in local gaps. Although some states (such as New Jersey) have policies that equalize funding across wealthy and poor districts, other states (such as New Hampshire) actually make inequalities worse by allocating more to wealthy districts than to poor ones. In a 2011 report on Return to Educational Investment, the Center for American Progress found that, on average across the nation, schools in affluent areas receive $825 more per student than those in high poverty areas. Given the tight fiscal situation following the 2008-09 recession, many schools will continue to face budget shortfalls for years to come. Schools in affluent areas receive $825 more per student than those in high poverty areas.

The Quest to Do Better

In the last thirty years, U.S. leaders have tried one approach after another to improve our schools. But the one obvious step we have not taken is a concerted effort to equalize resources for schools in wealthy, middle-class, and low-income neighborhoods. Reformers have tried vouchers, tests, “accountability” regulations, charter schools, and the deployment of new instructors from Teach for America. But politicians and reformers have not had the common-sense and courage to insist that every schoolchild should be backed by the same level of resources to help him or her succeed academically. Arguably, U.S. education reformers have been rearranging the deck chairs on a sinking ship that does not have enough infrastructure or resources to stay afloat.

To right this ship, all schools need more adequate and equal resources – which of course must also be spent wisely. Available research tells us that improved infrastructure, programmatic offerings, and teacher quality will boost student engagement and lead to higher levels of academic achievement and higher rates of high school graduation and college attendance. Equalized school funding could also reduce deeply entrenched racial gaps, which shamefully persist almost six decades after the landmark Supreme Court decision in Brown vs. Board of Education that was supposed to set America on course toward educational equality.

Of course, increasing school funding is not easy at any time – and especially not in hard economic times. There is “never enough money,” as the Superintendent of Worcester Public Schools explained at a recent Martin Luther King Day luncheon held at the College of the Holy Cross. But we should not accept this lightly. On average, the United States spends $11,665 per year to educate each child, but $88,000 per year to incarcerate each prisoner. Money spent on schools can avert poor life outcomes costly to individuals and society. It’s our choice to make.

Images of “student activism” often bring to mind leftist anti-war protests at Berkeley and Kent State. But across America today, conservative youth are active on many campuses, running newspapers and working through groups of College Republicans or Students for Liberty. Conservatives are active even at institutions with strong liberal reputations – the ones denounced as “indoctrinators” of students by pundits like David Horowitz.

Our research on conservative student activism pinpoints two different styles that tend to predominate in different clusters of institutions. A flamboyantly provocative style flourishes primarily at large state universities and lesser-known liberal arts colleges, while a more traditional “civilized discourse” style of conservative engagement predominates at leading private universities.  Each style is encouraged by its own set of national advocacy organizations.

Big Spenders and Provocative Student Activists

Radical activists on the left in the 1960s were often known for colorful language and flashy protest tactics – and the same is true for today’s provocative campus conservatives. They ridicule faculty with labels such as “tree hugging,” “gun taking,” “wealth hating,” and “leftist loving,” and stage showy events like Affirmative Action Bake Sales and Catch an Illegal Alien Days. Reminiscent of Abbie Hoffman and the Yippies, this provocative style of right-wing activism is designed to poke fun at liberals and attract the media spotlight. Where does this style come from, and why is it propagated mostly on large state campuses and lesser known liberal arts colleges?

At the center of today’s conservative youth movement are national organizations with deep pockets and well-articulated templates for confrontational activism. We can think of them as equivalent to Super PACS (political action committees) for college-age conservatism. To plant the seeds of the provocative style, these organizations distribute month-by-month “battle plans” to existing student clubs and send field representatives to help students start new groups. They offer money and extensive networking opportunities to help campus activism grow.

• In 2011, Young America’s Foundation boasted more than $40 million in assets and had expenditures of approximately $15 million, according to audited financial statements. Yearly expenditures underwrote campus speaking tours for conservative luminaries and paid for conservative students to attend regional and national conferences, where attendees would learn how to fight “persecution” with an “activist mentality.”
• With $15 million in the bank, the Leadership Institute spends about $7 million annually to encourage young conservatives. The organization keeps a database of “leftist faculty” and “biased textbooks” on some 2000 campuses, and it has trained tens of thousands of college students to run conservative election campaigns.

These organizations deliver a coordinated message to their young audience: You are under siege on your liberal campuses, and you must use aggressive tactics to counteract the discrimination.

Student Conservatism as “Civilized Discourse”

Despite vast sums of money devoted to its propagation, the provocative style has not taken root on every campus. Right-leaning students who do not fit the “Joe Average” profile (as one leader at Young America’s Foundation dubbed his organization’s beneficiaries) tend to look for support elsewhere. Especially at elite private institutions, students often disparage the provocative style as “not really conservative” in temperament, and as far too populist in its goals and aesthetics. Honing a “civilized discourse” style, these students aim to engage their classmates in reasoned debate, not shock them. They also profess too much respect for eminent faculty to make embarrassing scenes out on the quad. Pragmatically, conservative students at elite universities also want to avoid flamboyant public actions that could pop up in search engines when they apply for prestigious jobs in the future. Conservative students tend to engage in debates instead of flashy movements out of respect for faculty and each other’s futures.

The best-known national organization nurturing the civilized disposition is the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, founded in 1953 by the late William F. Buckley. The Institute advertises itself as the locale for the “best and the brightest” among conservative students. Financially, the Institute is no match for Young America’s Foundation (the Institute’s 2010 assets totaled $19 million according to the liberal research group MediaMatters). Yet it appeals to right-leaning students with more highbrow interests by offering seminars and internships plus networking opportunities for students interested in writing for the National Review or the Weekly Standard. Although some conservative students regard the Institute as a stuffy old boys’ club, those who do get involved see themselves as well prepared to pursue refined political discussions.

Causes and Consequences

Although students self-select into different types of schools, and schools likewise select specific types of students, there is strong evidence that young people imbibe their campus’s dominant mode of conservatism after they arrive at college. The provocative and civilized styles are encouraged by distinct sorts of national sponsors, and each is fostered by the climate and practices of the kinds of campuses where it predominates.

Obviously, these conservative styles fostered on Americas’ college campuses mimic the divide between populist and mainstream conservatism in today’s Republican Party – though in recent years populism has so penetrated the entire party base that provocative efforts must now be attempted by virtually all GOP candidates. Our research on conservative student activism suggests that distinct goals and styles will likely persist, as rising Republican leaders come out of college. There is also a real chance of growing schism. Unless conservatives who enact the disparate styles can reclaim common ground, the Republican Party may be in danger of splintering still further in future years. Contrasts in leadership goals and styles are not just prevalent in older generations. These differences are steadily replenished, even exacerbated, as future conservative leaders emerge from today’s campus training grounds for activism.