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Facebook and Apple Now Pay For Female Employees To Freeze Their Eggs
Dave Knott writes: While freezing eggs has become an increasingly popular practice for career-oriented women, the procedure comes at a steep price: Costs typically add up to at least $10,000 for every round, plus $500 or more annually for storage. Now two Silicon Valley giants are offering women a game-changing perk: Apple and Facebook will pay for employees to freeze their eggs. They appear to be the first major employers to offer this coverage for non-medical reasons, both offering to cover costs up to $20,000. Tech firms are hardly alone in offering generous benefits to attract and keep talent, but they appear to be leading the way with egg freezing.
Advocates say they've heard murmurs of large law, consulting, and finance firms helping to cover the costs, although no one is broadcasting this support. Companies may be concerned about the public relations implications of the benefit – in the most cynical light, egg-freezing coverage could be viewed as a ploy to entice women to sell their souls to their employer, sacrificing childbearing years for the promise of promotion. Will the perk pay off for companies? The benefit will likely encourage women to stay with their employer longer, cutting down on recruiting and hiring costs. And practically speaking, when women freeze their eggs early, firms may save on pregnancy costs in the long run. A woman could avoid paying to use a donor egg down the road, for example, or undergoing more intensive fertility treatments when she's ready to have a baby. But the emotional and cultural payoff may be more valuable, helping women be more productive human beings.
Advocates say they've heard murmurs of large law, consulting, and finance firms helping to cover the costs, although no one is broadcasting this support. Companies may be concerned about the public relations implications of the benefit – in the most cynical light, egg-freezing coverage could be viewed as a ploy to entice women to sell their souls to their employer, sacrificing childbearing years for the promise of promotion. Will the perk pay off for companies? The benefit will likely encourage women to stay with their employer longer, cutting down on recruiting and hiring costs. And practically speaking, when women freeze their eggs early, firms may save on pregnancy costs in the long run. A woman could avoid paying to use a donor egg down the road, for example, or undergoing more intensive fertility treatments when she's ready to have a baby. But the emotional and cultural payoff may be more valuable, helping women be more productive human beings.
A few of you had questions about the 'work/life balance' at this company. I take it that those have been settled?
Someone let the IT guy into the HR office again.
"helping women be more productive human beings." Because working at Apple is more productive than raising a family?
emotional and cultural payoff may be more valuable, helping women be more productive human beings.
Women are human beings?
I am seriously appalled at that parting shot. I think choosing to pursue a career vs raising a family is a perfectly valid option. Bonus points if you can do both, but there are trade-offs for any of the choices.
Also
encourage women to stay with their employer longer
Yeah, yeah, that's fine. "Encourage." Right up until the employer starts pressuring a woman into doing so and committing to her career before she can move ahead. For instance, unofficially giving preference to those who have done so when promoting/hiring. Might be a non-issue, as a woman could still choose to have children unless she's taken steps to remove that possibility.
So, if they install a wheelchair ramp for a disabled employee at your company, do you demand they spend the same amount on amenities for everyone else? If they employ an on-site councillor to help employees deal with stress but you never use the service, do you demand they employ someone to mow your lawn instead?
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
I'd add that, as a man, I'd like to see paternity time increased. When my first child was born, I was lucky enough to be able to take a week off of work to help. My wife had just given birth and while I can't ever completely know how hard that is, I knew enough to know that she would be exhausted so I took care of our new baby as much as I could - giving her time to rest up. Had I been able to take longer than a week, I would have.
When our second child was born, I took a couple of days off, but wasn't able to take the week-long stretch that I took the first time.
Many new fathers are looked down upon if they try to take time off to look after the new baby. There was one baseball player who was recently castigated by a sports announcer for daring to miss the first game of the season because his wife gave birth. He decided that helping his wife and new baby were more important than a baseball game. The sports announcer literally thought that the ball player's first priority should be to the game and not his family.
Better paternity leave will also help women in the workplace because then the burden on taking care of the baby post-birth can be split evenly instead of just being tossed on the woman. (And then having people say "If we hire women they might leave to take care of their babies.")
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
There's no need for balance! There's only work. And then dying. Now shut up and like it, dispensable interchangeable resource creature!
Seriously, our biologically best childbearing years are likely in the 18-25 range. Maturity wise, we're probably better parents often in the 28-35 range. Later than that, you're going to have some issues. Keeping up with agile, active kids at 35+ is more draining than it was at 18, 25 or even 30. The odds of complications are also higher. So are the odds of small families (the wear and tear of a pregnancy at older ages is higher and people want to have a second or third child less often as a result). That means kids get denied some of the social context they might have if people were having slightly bigger families (and starting younger). As an older parent, you also tend to be involved in fewer physical activities with the child. (I'm not saying in any event that some parents aren't able to keep up or aren't fully involved in sports and other activities, but on average, fewer older parents will be).
The companies are mercenary. They'll coddle you as long as they think you are useful and replacing you would be more expensive. They'll try to convince you to work hard, long hours and remunerate you not with what any objective standard thinks you deserve, but the least they can get away with (why you generally get more from moving companies). And they'll dispense with you rapidly if you show any signs of cracks from illness, stress or if your skillset simply no longer fits their needs or if their business case changes. Loyalty is a conveniently fostered illusion (a convenient fiction for HR types).
Also, your odds of getting sick or dying are higher as you age. This means the chance the kids lose their parents at vulnerable times in their lives goes up. If you are younger, this is less likely and your kids stand a better chance of getting to maturity and hopefully independence and emotional readiness before having to deal with the loss of a parent.
Our society is kind of backwards. I hate to say it, but those in Utah had some parts of it right. I had a friend from Corel go down as part of the team picking up the Word Perfect code base. He noted that down there, their universities and colleges were filled with late twenties women. They had elected to have kids in the 18-25 zone and had them up to school age by their late twenties so they could pursue a higher education and a career once the kids were in school. This model has all sorts of benefits biologically and statistically. (Again, not saying individual cases, and even a fair number of them overall, of parents of older ages don't work out just fine... mine did, albeit with many health scares and a lot less involvement in physical activities or sports).
-- Mal: "Well they tell you: never hit a man with a closed fist. But it is, on occasion, hilarious."
And in 20yrs they'll be screaming that there are now tech workers.
Where did they all go?
Well back in 2014 you paid all the smart women not to have kids so....
Brilliant!
Pregnancy is not a disability.
No, this is sexism against women.
First - freezing the eggs is simple, but getting them is not. It's not risk-free, and not at all a non-event. If you do not believe me, stab yourself in the balls with knitting needles 20 times after giving yourself a hormone injection every day for a few weeks.
Second. Signalling that healthy women should consider infertility treatment is just absurd. If they work so much now so they don't have time to find someone, is this really the solution to the correct problem?
Helping women (and men) with fertility problems is noble and good (maybe - it's also very hard to adopt children.) But pitched like this, it's just sick.
"But the emotional and cultural payoff may be more valuable, helping women be more productive human beings."
Some people would assert that raising happy, healthy, well-adjusted and well-loved children makes a more "productive" and "valuable" human being than working at a law firm or technology company.
But hey, I'm old fashioned.
-Styopa