Silicon Valley is known for its crazy employee perks, from unlimited vacation leaves to five-star chef-prepared meals. The latest these technology companies have to offer? They want to shoulder the cost of freezing women's eggs in cryo-preservation so they can work first and get pregnant later.
As NBC News reports, Facebook has already started offering its female employees the option to have their eggs put on ice until they are ready to get pregnant at a later age. On January 1, 2015, Apple will also start offering the same benefit.
Egg freezing, which has just recently gone past the experimental stage, was first developed in the 1980s as a means to preserve the fertility of women with cancer undergoing chemotherapy, which damages a woman's eggs. As the technology progressed, more and more women in their 30s and 40s have turned to egg-freezing as a sort of insurance against their loudly ticking biological clocks while working to build a solid career foundation.
The cost of egg-freezing is not cheap. Facebook and Apple will be shouldering the cost of two cycles, which run up to $10,000 each, as well as the yearly $500 in storage fees. It's a benefit female employees can choose to avail of, not something their employers are shoving down their throats.
"Having a high-powered career and children is still a very hard thing to do," says egg-freezing advocate Brigitte Adams and founder of Eggsurance.com.
Adams lauds Facebook and Apple, as well as other firms that have quietly started offering the same benefit, because it's a way for these companies, which are largely dominated by males, to encourage women to go into the technology industry while creating a life they designed for themselves.
In a study published in Fertility and Sterility journal in 2013, 19 percent of women who had undergone egg cryo-preservation cited that the inflexibility of the workplace was their reason for delaying childbirth. Majority of the women surveyed also said they felt "empowered" and that they had taken a major step to improve their reproductive future by having their eggs frozen.
However, cryo-preservation is not the perfect solution. While this procedure allows older women to get pregnant with younger eggs, the success rate of egg freezing is pegged, on average, at 31.5 percent for women who had their eggs frozen at age 25. The number goes lower as women opt for egg freezing later in their lives. That is according to an analysis of more than 2,000 egg freezing cycles published (pdf) in 2013.
Apple says egg freezing is not the only benefit it offers for women, as it has also began offering extended maternity leaves and an adoption assistance program to provide financial assistance to employees who are looking to legally adopt a child. Facebook, on the other hand, provides new parents $4,000 in "baby cash," for shouldering expenses such as diapers, clothing, toys and other things.
But some experts see egg-freezing is not the solution to a larger workplace problem, especially in an industry riddled with gender gaps. Glenn Cohen, co-director of Harvard Law School's Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology and Bioethics, wrote a blog post posing the unasked questions on the matter.
"Would potential female associates welcome this option knowing that they can work hard early on and still reproduce, if they so desire, later on?" he asks. "Or would they take this as a signal that the firm thinks that working there as an association and pregnancy are incompatible?"
