Work–Life Fragility, Dilemmas, and “Gambling” at the Intersection of Fertility Treatment and Employment

Infertility is a working age population issue, meaning that many individuals undergoing fertility treatment are also in paid work—having to navigate conflicts between two often “greedy institutions,” which can both bring precarity. Traditional approaches to examining the work–life interface, focusing mainly on temporal issues, fail to account for the multifaceted nature of conflict at the intersect of fertility treatment and work, including its embodied and political nature and how individuals navigate work–life dilemmas. We suggest that Lefebre's rhythmanalysis offers potential for extending work–life theorizing and that it can be used, including as elaborated by Toyoki et al., as a conceptual toolkit to generate discourse and action on this less well understood topic. Drawing on biographical narrative interview data from workers in higher education employment, we highlight the myriad challenges individuals try to navigate and offer the concept of “work–life fragility” to better account for individual positioning. Work–life fragility concerns a situation in which (1) two unstable and precarious rhythms intersect, creating multifaceted arrhythmia; (2) there is an individualization of responsibility for addressing arrhythmia; and (3) individual strategies provide only “fragile synchronicities” due to fallible resources, which amplifies feelings of insecurity. Our paper concludes with implications for the design of policy and practice, going beyond time off work for fertility treatment appointments to address embodied risk and psychological tolls; to provide support for decision‐making; and to modify systems to help mitigate long‐term career impacts. This should better support affected workers, and start to shift responsibility for mitigating/resolving arrhythmia off the shoulders of individual staff alone.