Facebook and Apple will freeze eggs for female employees

Tech companies are known for their unique and all-encompassing staff benefits, but now Apple and Facebook have gone the extra mile to offer perks around their female employees' fertility options.

Both companies will offer up to $20,000 for staff for elective egg freezing coverage, allowing female employees to better plan their lives and delay childbirth until they want to start a family.

NBCNews.com, which broke the story, reported each round of egg freezing can cost about $10,000, with storage costing $500 per year. If done at a young enough age, egg freezing can increase a woman's chances of getting pregnant later in life.

The move from Apple comes just after its head of HR, Denise Young-Smith, announced a range of other new benefits offered to staff, including extended parental leave, education reimbursements, and donations from Apple matching for hours of non-profit work.

Young-Smith, who was hired earlier this year, has been making a big effort with diversity and inclusion programmes and making them a top priority to attract and retain talent in Apple.

She told The Guardian these benefits to a broader employee base are part of the company's promise to look at new ways health programmes can meet employee needs.

"We continue to expand our benefits for women, with a new extended maternity leave policy, along with cyropreservation and egg storage as part of our extensive support for infertility treatments … We want to empower women at Apple to do the best work of their lives as they care for loved ones and raise their families."

Facebook also offers egg freezing for female employees, as well as other fertility assistance such as for adoption and surrogacy.

While it's good to see both companies making a concerted effort to rectify the gender imbalance currently present in both organisations (earlier this year both Facebook and Apple said its workforce was around 70% male, and other companies like Google, LinkedIn and Yahoo also came clean about their less-than-impressive diversity statistics) it's important to note that the impact of perks around the personal issue of fertility need to be treated with utmost sensitivity.

While the egg freezing makes Facebook and Apple look like caring employees, how HR communicates these benefits is hugely important to ensure young women don't feel pressured or forced to put off childbirth for the sake of their career with the company.

Additionally, could women who freeze their eggs be less likely to leave both companies knowing their egg storage might be in jeopardy? Does being given the option to delay childbirth just add a whole extra pressure onto working women?

As Seema Mohapatra, a biomedical and healthcare law expert, wrote in this recent Harvard Law & Policy Review, "Egg freezing seems to put a Band-Aid on the problem of how difficult it is for women to have a career and raise a family concurrently."

Let us know your thoughts below.

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