Every society has its own signals—the hanky code, the safety pin—and in this one, it’s the bag. About the size of a Birkin, if a Birkin came in an easy-wipe microfiber most closely associated with drugstore umbrellas, and only in black. The fellowship of the bag provides a tacit solidarity, even an intimacy, however fleeting. Members of its Manhattan and Brooklyn chapters lock amused eyes in elevators; they nod and smile ruefully as they pass each other in the street. One might spot another as she waits outside a workplace’s always-occupied “wellness room” and beckon her instead toward a secret storage closet, equipped with a comfy chair and—more crucially—a door that locks. On public transport, an emeritus member might give up her seat to a downtrodden carrier of the bag, given the likelihood that she was up unusually early that day, or will be up unusually late.
The bag is just one component of the product known as the Medela Pump in Style Advanced Breast Pump with On the Go Tote. Inside the On the Go Tote can be found a small cooler that holds up to four bottles, along with the electric pump, an A.C. adapter, and a jumble of plastic parts and tubes that must be disassembled, washed, sterilized in a microwave, cooled and dried, and then reassembled after each use. It may be theoretically possible to pump in style, but breast-feeding does not readily lend itself to automation: where a baby’s mouth presses intelligently on the breast to release milk from the duct, the Medela employs a suction method abetted by a hard, ill-fitting breast shield with a bottle dangling from it. The suction pulls and stretches the breast like it’s taffy, except that taffy doesn’t have nerve endings. Some women manage to strap on the shields using a customized bra, a gently bovine parody of Madonna’s cone-bra ensemble that frees the user’s hands for some desktop multitasking. But this setup requires a near-ideal marriage of bra and breast, a union that is difficult to achieve even under less encumbered circumstances. Without it, the mother must hold the shields in place, hunched and staring into space for up to twenty minutes per session, while “The Daily” floats up from her iPhone over the HENGH-ughgh HENGH-ughgh HENGH-ughgh of the pump’s motor. When the pumping mother doesn’t have a finger free to scroll through pictures of her baby, at least she has Michael Barbaro’s “Hm!”s to stimulate her oxytocin flow.
The Medela pump has competitors available from Ameda, Philips Avent, and others, but the fellowship of the bag underscores the company’s dominance. Eighty per cent of hospitals in the United States and the United Kingdom stock Medela’s pumps, and its sales increased thirty-four per cent in the two years after the passage of the Affordable Care Act, which mandated coverage of lactation services, including pumps. New parents can be paralyzed by the paradox of choice amid the glut of strollers, car seats, cribs, baby carriers, and high chairs on the market; Medela’s ubiquity can help give them one fewer decision to make—the fellowship of the bag offers safety in numbers.
Still, if given more alternatives, it’s safe to say that nursing mothers would try them. “Shouldn’t the breast pump be as elegant as an iPhone and as quiet as a Prius by now?” asked an article in the Times, in 2014, a much-circulated cri de coeur that helped lead to a breast-pump hackathon at M.I.T. later that year. Nearly four million American women will give birth in 2017, and the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that they try to breast-feed for at least twelve months. Why don’t they have a slew of pumps to choose from?
Part of the answer can be found in a new Bloomberg piece, by Emily Chang and Ellen Huet, about a startup, the California–based Naya Health Inc., that makes a smart breast pump. “The Naya’s soft suction cup mimics the feel of a baby’s mouth and distributes the suction over a broader area of a woman’s breast,” Chang and Huet write. According to the company’s founder, Janica Alvarez, “the Naya delivers 30 percent more breast milk and is 20 percent faster than alternatives, thanks to a unique water-based system,” the writers continue. “The company is also planning to sell a smart bottle that will be able to track the volume, calorie count and fat content of breast milk and inputs them into an app.” Reading these words, I began levitating, and also wondering how I could nominate Alvarez for the Nobel Peace Prize.
Venture capitalists, however, do not appear to share my enthusiasm for breast-pump #disruption, perhaps because the industry is ninety-three per cent male. According to Bloomberg, Alvarez initially raised about $6.5 million from investors. To put that number in perspective, it’s about the same as what Twist, the defunct iPhone app designed to let your friends know you were running late, raised back in 2012. Or put it this way: Juicero raised a hundred and twenty million dollars. But Naya “recently hit a wall” with funding, and turned to a Kickstarter campaign to keep the lights on. Alvarez told Bloomberg that investors commented on her body and questioned her ability to run a startup while raising three small children. She recalls one pitch meeting where investors looked at a porn site, and another where a V.C. rep refused to touch her product, calling it “disgusting”—which is, incidentally, the same adjective President Trump used to describe a lawyer who took a planned break during a deposition to pump milk for her infant. Neither our political nor our entrepreneurial leaders, it seems, are poised to help resolve the conflicts and contradictions created by too-brief maternity leaves, A.A.P. guidelines, and technological shortfalls.
Even were she not pushing a product that somehow both titillated and repulsed her potential investors, Alvarez faced an uphill climb. Companies led by women received less than five per cent of all V.C. funding in 2016. According to CNN, a study conducted between 2011 and 2013 “found that teams comprised entirely of men were four times more likely to get VC funding than those that had even one woman on their executive team.” A Swedish study recently noted that when venture capitalists talk about fledgling entrepreneurs, the men are described as “promising” while the women are “inexperienced.” Alvarez’s case goes further in defining what “experience” really means to the V.C. community: a woman who breast-fed her children seeks venture capital for products to serve women who breast-feed their children, and yet both her womanhood and her children—for Naya Health, an R. & D. component unto themselves—are used against her.
Some of the roadblocks nursing mothers encounter, in any setting, are due to a kind of innocent ignorance. (Once upon a time at an offsite meeting, a lovely and well-meaning office manager—a woman in her early twenties—proposed that I pump in a shower stall.) Alvarez’s tale of the V.C. gauntlet is something else. “I felt like I was in the middle of a fraternity,” she said—and of course, she was. Whether it’s breast pumps or period-tracking apps, the gender-based idiocy of Silicon Valley long ago lost its shock value; what’s both surprising and incalculable is just how much money its kingmakers are leaving on the table by shunning women and mothers and babies. Breast pumps make up a seven-hundred-million-dollar market, with ample room to grow, but for venture capitalists, perhaps the pleasures and comforts of sexism are priceless. Nursing mothers, meanwhile, lug the industry’s indifference around in a bag.
