Free lunches, dry cleaning, massages — frozen eggs?
Silicon Valley’s biggest companies have long offered cushy perks to attract top talent and keep workers happy logging scores of hours on the job. But beyond day-to-day luxuries, Facebook and Apple will now give up to $20,000 of benefits to help employees pay for infertility treatments and sperm donors and to even freeze women’s eggs.
The move comes amid stiff competition for skilled engineers and as many of the biggest firms try to bring more women to their male-dominated ranks.
“Anything that gives women more control over the timing of fertility is going to be helpful to professional women,” said Shelley Correll, a sociology professor and director of the Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University. “The time that’s most important in work, for getting your career established, often coincides with normal fertility time for women.”
Facebook this year started offering to reimburse workers for up to $20,000 of reproductive-related costs, over the course of employment. Apple’s perks will start next year.
The procedure can cost more than $10,000, plus storage costs of several hundred dollars a year. Later, it costs another several thousand to thaw and fertilize the eggs and implant them in the womb.
The number of egg-freezing patients at the New York University Fertility Center rose to 400 this year from five in 2005, said Dr. Nicole Noyes, a fertility specialist at the center.
Apple’s and Facebook’s reproductive benefits policies also could appeal to gay and lesbian couples who want to use a surrogate or a sperm donor to have a baby, or heterosexual couples who incur in vitro fertilization costs not covered by insurance.
