Facebook And Apple Will Pay For Their Female Employees' Eggs To Be Frozen

Tech Companies Trying To Attract More Female Workers

Apple and Facebook, along with  most tech companies, have a big gender imbalance. Apple reports that 70% of their employees are males and for Facebook it’s 69% male. In order to rectify this enormous imbalance, Facebook and Apple offer their female employees some advantages. Facebook will, for instance, give their employees having babies $4,000 in ‘baby cash’. Apple even covers up to $15,000 in fertility treatments. However, this hasn't been enough to attract more female employees and, in order to do so, Facebook and Apple will cover expenses for their female employees to have their eggs frozen.

Egg-freezing is usually offered to women about to undergo chemotherapy, because it can make women infertile. Egg-freezing offers the possibility of getting pregnant even after chemotherapy, because the patient's eggs are removed from her body and frozen, ready to be used when she decides to have children or not.

This seems like a great thing to offer to your employees. Facebook and Apple will enable their female employees to focus on their career and still let them have children in their later life, when they are ready or when their career won't necessarily suffer from pregnancy. Egg-freezing does empower women who now also have choices regarding when they want to become pregnant without the pressure of their biological clock, but it is also important to ask what message Facebook and Apple are sending. Would this mean that women who choose to have children early on, choosing to juggle having a career with having a family, will be looked down upon for not choosing to freeze their eggs?

For all intents and purposes, egg-freezing just seems like another service that Facebook and Apple are willing to provide for their employees. It could be a great step to resolving the conflict that certain women face between career and children, and could even lead to a greater cultural acceptance of egg-freezing.

However, it is important to note that the technology surrounding egg-freezing is fairly recent. There is not enough data to market it as a miracle cure for delaying pregnancy. While providing egg-freezing is a great step for Apple and Facebook, it is still in its experimental phase and before considering it as the only way to have children, Facebook and Apple's employees should really do their research.

Egg-freezing is far from perfect; just because you went through the whole ordeal does not mean that your eggs will be ready to use when you are. The percentages of success are still unclear and women should be aware of that before jumping on the bandwagon, just because Facebook and Apple are paying for it. Furthermore, the side-effects of the fertility treatments women have to take before their eggs are harvested can be pretty bad and in some rare cases even fatal.

Ultimately, what a women does with her body - and when - must be her own choice. Egg-freezing does provide more room to choose when to start a family or not, however women must not feel pressurized by Apple and Facebook to start families later. Egg-freezing is still in its early days, but in the future, it could enable women to live their lives without the pressure of having children before it is too late.

Laura Veit

Laura is a recent graduate from University of East Anglia in Film and Television Studies, currently interning as a content writer but hoping to one day live off her writing. Follow her @LauraAtSMF.

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