Yesterday brought the slightly unnerving news that Facebook and Apple are to offer their female employees free egg-freezing, in a bid to recruit and retain more women at companies that are currently about 70 per cent male.
What to make of this? On the one hand, it should be a positive sign that employee benefits are being tailored to women, particularly at tech companies, a sector that is notoriously male-dominated. The egg-freezing offer comes on top of previous family-friendly policies including longer parental leave at Apple and adoption and surrogacy assistance at Facebook. On the other hand, as one friend put it, “it's a bit weird.”
Egg-freezing is increasingly popular, and hugely expensive, costing several thousand pounds a cycle in the UK, in addition to annual storage fees and, further down the line, costs to thaw, fertilise and transfer the embryos. As with the contraceptive pill, it gives women control to decide when they want to start a family, and is powerful in that respect. That the pill is available free on the NHS is lauded—and absolutely rightly so—as a huge advancement for women's rights in this country for just that reason. At the moment, however, egg-freezing is only available on the NHS for some patients undergoing treatments that can inhibit fertility. So what is wrong with companies stepping up to help their employees access that service instead?
It does feel, though, rather like they have missed the point. Campaigners are making huge and largely unheeded efforts to encourage workplaces to become more family-friendly—for the sake of both women and men. And the family-friendly policies that have been adopted by these companies and others are obviously welcome—particularly in the US, where there is no legal requirement to offer employees paid parental leave and where there is less access to services such as free contraception and IVF treatment, which are (at least sometimes) available here on the NHS.
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Apple and Facebook are forward-thinking, not creepy
But an employer (significantly not a state-funded healthcare provider) offering free egg-freezing feels like an implicit acknowledgement of the fact that some female workers want to delay having children because of the impact it can have on their careers. Companies shouldn't be spending money on accommodating that unfortunate truth, but on changing the structures to ensure that childbearing doesn't damage careers and that working life is flexible enough that men and women are able to start families when they want to.
That would be good for gender equality in the workplace. It would also be good for everyone's happiness and consequently, it is fashionable to argue, productivity—not that happiness should require such a justification. But if we must talk practicalities, it is also a better solution because egg-freezing doesn't take away the risks associated with pregnancy at an older age and the success rates of IVF implantation remain low. According to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, as of December 2012, the 580 embryos that had been created from frozen eggs and transferred to women in the UK had resulted in just 20 babies.
These are companies that have made positive steps in introducing family-friendly policies—with additional offers of extended parental leave and adoption assistance, they don't appear to be discouraging family life. I fully appreciate that some female employees will be grateful for the offer of a treatment they may have considered but couldn't otherwise afford. But, when a key battleground in the fight for gender equality at work is the negative impact that having children can have on a woman's (and not a man's) career, there's something uncomfortable about it being your employer putting this particular offer on the table—it begins to look like an attempt to step over the problem rather than fix it. (It is probably no coincidence that, according to Nicole Noyes of NYU Fertility Center, some big banks—not exactly renowned for their family-friendly working environments—have also been offering to cover the procedure.)
If these companies are really worried about addressing the office gender-balance, surely the thousands of dollars that are being offered here could be better spent going out and actively recruiting more women; ensuring they are given equal opportunities for promotion; and creating a family-friendly work environment instead?
