Facebook's Egg Freezing Policy Isn't an Evil Plot

By Joshua Brustein October 15, 2014

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Photograph by Ted Horowitz/Corbis

Frozen embryos and eggs in nitrogen cooled container

In retrospect, of course the move by Facebook (FB) and Apple (AAPL) to pay female workers to freeze their eggs would be greeted with some cynicism. An employer handing over $20,000 to facilitate delayed childbirth must be hoping for something in return— perhaps years of labor uninterrupted by soccer games and ballet recitals?

There’s one glaring problem with the dystopian reading, at least as far as the Menlo Park social network goes: Facebook happens to offer tremendously plush incentives to employees who do choose to have children. Employees are eligible for $4,000 in cash when they become parents, whether biologically or through adoption. The company also offers four months of paid parental leave to mothers and fathers, with considerable flexibility on how that leave is taken. Facebook subsidizes daycare and has nursing rooms on campus.
Compared with the miserly corporate standard in the U.S., this is all, frankly, overwhelmingly generous. Only 15 percent of workers at large companies get any paid family leave time at all, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Legally, employees aren’t entitled to any paid leave; under the Family and Medical Leave Act, a company is required only to guarantee a worker’s job, and only for 12 weeks.

Story: The Real Reason Women Freeze Their Eggs Isn't Career Growth

As for actually having the baby, egg freezing is just one of several reproductive methods that Facebook covers. The company already pays for surrogacy agency fees, in-vitro fertilization, egg and sperm donor fees, and legal costs associated with adoption.
But perhaps the biggest indication of how friendly these companies are to families is whether people feel comfortable enough to take advantage of the policies offered. After all, it’s well documented that other perks, such as vacation time, are often left unclaimed. Facebook wouldn’t say what proportion of people take their full allotment of parental leave.
It’s fair to ask the same question of the egg freezing benefit. As of now, relatively few women freeze their eggs (although that may be in part because it’s so expensive). Doctors estimate that to date, only 5,000 live births are the result of egg freezing—or about 1/10th of 1 percent of the number of total births in the U.S. in 2012 alone. Sure, it seems likely that tech workers, with their careerism and affection for science-y solutions to all of life’s problems, may be overrepresented among the egg freezers. Even so, Facebook’s egg freezers are likely to be a small club.

Story: Later, Baby: Will Freezing Your Eggs Free Your Career?

Facebook and others are covering egg freezing for the same reason they pass out free snacks and collude with one another—to discourage poaching of employees: Skilled tech workers have more professional options than almost anyone else. Companies will continue to offer all kinds of crazy benefits as long as the labor market in Silicon Valley remains tight.