FROZEN EGGS FOR FEMALE STAFF?
Being employee-friendly just climbed to a fresh new level. Companies like Facebook and Apple are reportedly offering as much as $20,000 to support their female employees in freezing their reproductive eggs. They’re doing this in a bid to hold on to their best workers, and to support them in their choices of having children when they wished without having to pay attention to their ‘natural biological clocks’.
Egg freezing is an increasingly popular way to delay child bearing. It costs about $US10,000 initially and then $500 each month after that.
In the raging war for talent, Silicon Valley companies are offering an array of new family-planning perks. Apple said it also reimburses eligible expenses associated with the legal adoption of a child.
Egg freezing gives women more control over when to have children. A women who turns thirty may be conscious of her biological clock ticking and therefore she may come under pressure to have children regardless of whether she wants them or not. But with egg-freezing, if a 25-year-old woman stores her eggs, she can have children with the same eggs when she’s thirty-five or even forty-five. This is because the eggs don’t age.
According to US government data, 20 per cent of women in the country wait until age 35 to have their first child. Around one third of women aged 35-39 have fertility problems and the proportion increases to 64 per cent when women are between 40 and 44 years old.
Given this data, companies like Facebook and Apple must be commended for supporting their female employees in this manner.
