Facebook, Apple to offer egg freezing benefits

Free lunches, dry cleaning, massages — frozen eggs?
Silicon Valley’s biggest companies have long offered cushy perks to attract top talent and keep workers happy logging scores of hours on the job. But beyond day-to-day luxuries, Facebook and Apple will now give up to USD20,000 in benefits to help employees pay for infertility treatments, sperm donors and even to freeze their eggs. The move comes amid stiff competition for skilled engineers, and as many of the biggest firms try to diversify their male-dominated ranks to include and appeal to more women.
“Anything that gives women more control over the timing of fertility is going to be helpful to professional women,” said Shelley Correll, a sociology professor and director of the Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University. “It potentially addresses the conflicts between the biological clock and the clockwork of women’s careers: The time that’s most important in work, for getting your career established, often coincides with normal fertility time for women. This can potentially help resolve that by pushing women’s fertility into the future.”
Facebook this year started offering to reimburse workers for up to $20,000 worth of reproductive-related costs, over the course of employment. Apple’s similar perks will start next year. The companies’ egg-freezing benefits were first reported by NBCNews.com on Tuesday.
Freezing their eggs gives women an option to focus on their career or education first, the “leaning in” that Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg champions.
Dr. Alan Copperman, a fertility specialist at Mount Sinai Hospital thinks Apple and Facebook are ahead of the game in offering to cover the procedure, both as a recruitment and retention tool and from a public health perspective. He expects other companies to follow suit, “because it’s the right thing to do and it’s going to send a signal that women’s health should be a priority.” Barbara Ortutay, Technology Writer, New York, AP