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into the egg donation business. The founder of Gametes Inc. derided other egg agencies as simply offering “picture galleries” of attractive young women, and he decided his company would medically and psychologically screen prospective donors before posting their profiles to its website. He hired new staff members, and within just three years, Gametes Inc. had compiled a roster of 75 women who were willing to donate their eggs, a surprising figure given that the sperm bank offered samples from just 112 men after so many years of being open.
    In starting the egg agency, though, Gametes Inc. did not follow the model it had established at its sperm bank. The new staffers hired to runthe egg agency worked in a different wing of the building, and they were sometimes surprised when I pointed out the differences in protocols that each program had developed. For example, the sperm bank had an elaborate identity-release program, one in which it paid men 50% more per sample if they consented to release identifying information to offspring. In contrast, the egg agency, like most egg agencies, had no such program and even refused to give egg donors basic information about whether their recipients had become pregnant or not, a direct contrast to the more open egg agencies on the West Coast. Examples such as this underscore the extent to which there is gendered bifurcation in program protocols. However, the fact that the content of those protocols can be so variable provides further evidence that there is nothing inherent in biology or technology that determines particular policies.
    There is also evidence of the gendered framing of egg and sperm donation at Gametes Inc. Gametes Inc.’s egg agency created its own distinct website, which differed in both design and organization from the sperm bank’s website, and each program asked prospective donors to fill out gender-specific applications with different questions for women and men. Staffers joked around with sperm donors, offering them free T-shirts and key chains with funny slogans, but egg agency staffers thanked women for their gift with Fabergé-esque eggs or small hearts at the end of a cycle. One similarity between the egg and sperm branches of Gametes Inc. is that both offer adult photos of donors; its sperm bank is one of the few in the country to do so. However, just 27% of men’s profiles included adult photos, compared to 92% of women’s profiles.
    At University Fertility Services, there had been an active sperm donation program for years when nurse–coordinators began recruiting egg donors. In organizing both kinds of donation, staff members offered recipients very little information about donors, and they maintained strict anonymity, as at other university programs on the East Coast. The similarity ends there, though. As at Gametes Inc., there were different screening protocols for and expectations of women and men. For example, during a period in the 1990s, the same person was responsible for screening both egg and sperm donors, and she used the same preliminary questionnaire. However, many of the egg donors’ forms included ascribbled note about why the woman was interested in being a donor (e.g., “why—wants to help” or “why—loves kids”). Not a single one of the sperm donors’ forms includes these handwritten notations about motivations. 20 By the time I conducted research there in 2006, the sperm donor program was no longer active, but this question about women’s motivations had been formally incorporated into the intake questionnaire for egg donor applicants.
    The different expectations of egg and sperm donors are made especially clear in this discussion with a prominent physician–researcher who had served as medical director of University Fertility Services for two decades. When asked how he would define a great egg donor, in addition to discussing her medical and reproductive history, he explained,
    Physician: I like to see some altruism of the