facebook and apple offer women $20,000 to freeze their eggs
Last week, monolith companies Facebook and Apple both announced that they would pay female staffers a whopping $20,000 to freeze their eggs. Egg freezing is fast becoming a popular way to delay child bearing, as it allows women to have a baby later on in life with eggs that are “younger”, therefore lowering the risk of complications. But the procedure costs are high. It’s about $10,000 to do the initial surgery, and women have to take medications for several weeks to stimulate their egg production. Once that procedure is complete, the eggs must be frozen and stored, which costs about $500 a year. Lastly, when eggs are thawed and transferred via IVF, that procedure costs $5,000.
This announcement comes surprisingly close to the release of the diversity reports of top tech companies such as Google, Apple, and Microsoft, which stated that female workers average around 30% and rarely hold technical positions. It’s clear that Facebook and Apple think that the answer to solving a lack of gender diversity is to encourage women to work hard at work during their most fertile years instead of work hard on having a family. Then, when their use-by date at work has passed, women are then allowed to try to have a baby with those eggs that were frozen a few years back. It’s as if the companies are waving money in their worker’s faces and telling them that they can only have that money if they allow the companies to decide what happens to their eggs, instead of how it should be, which is the other way around entirely.
The announcement really seems to have missed the mark by a long shot. Writers, journalists and feminists alike have expressed concern about how this move makes women out to be products of Facebook and Apple, instead of human workers who have their own lives and are entitled to have a family when they want. It’s definitely disturbing that these companies are choosing such a radical option to help their hard-working female workers leave their jobs temporarily to raise a family, instead of opting for, say, longer paid parental leave or the opportunity to work from home.
Facebook already holds a good record when it comes to supporting mothers: they offer financial support for surrogacy and IVF, a payment when they finally become parents, and access to nursing rooms at the work site. But the number of Facebook’s female employees is still staggeringly low. Adding this huge payment for undergoing a complicated and not-always-effective procedure to the mix is just another cherry on top of an obviously non-functioning bid to keep female workers.
So, what would actually solve the problem of the lack of gender diversity and make it so that female workers are able to start a family when they want to? Something simple, I think. Like providing support for women when they actually want to have children, instead of telling them they will get a lot of money if they wait just that little bit longer. Sure, this may be a huge incentive for some people, so we can’t rule out that many may benefit from this. However, the line between a company controlling every aspect of their workers lives, including their bodies themselves, has definitely been crossed here. Let’s hope that the future of parenthood and the struggle of work–life balance are given the chance to take a step in a more natural, less-mechanistic approach.
