Apple and Facebook offer to freeze eggs for female employees

Apple and Facebook are offering to freeze eggs for female employees in an effort to attract more women on to their staff.

Apple, the world’s most valuable brand, said it would offer the perk to US-based staff from January.

“Apple cares deeply about our employees and their families, and we are always looking at new ways our health programmes can meet their needs,” said the company.

“We continue to expand our benefits for women, with a new extended maternity leave policy, along with cyropreservation and egg storage as part of our extensive support for infertility treatments … We want to empower women at Apple to do the best work of their lives as they care for loved ones and raise their families.”

Apple’s move follows the appointment of Denise Young Smith as head of human resources in February. She is making a big push on diversity and inclusion at the iPhone-maker.

The offer to freeze eggs is among initiatives that include longer parental leave, education reimbursements for all classes taken by employees and subsidised student loan refinancing.

In an effort to attract and retain talent, Young Smith has asked Apple’s 98,000 employees to find out what kind of benefits they care most about.

Facebook offers up to $20,000 (£13,000) for egg freezing for female employees. The company also offers adoption and surrogacy assistance and “a host of other fertility services for male and female employees”, the company said.

A typical round of egg freezing costs about $10,000, with $500 or more in fees each year for storage. Two rounds are usually necessary to harvest about 20 eggs, which is considered ideal.

The latest moves by Apple and Facebook are part of a growing trend to offer more employee perks at Silicon Valley companies to recruit new staff.

“This is a nice perk but of course it’s a very personal decision for every working woman,” Kellye Sheehan, of Women in Technology, a Washington-based organisation for women in the industry, told USA Today.

“When to time college, grad school, babies, starting a career, accelerating a career – all of these have huge ramifications in your life and that of your significant other. Is the employer trying to tell us something?

“Agreed, working mothers have a lot to juggle. But you can’t let your employer force you into something that doesn’t fit your values or personal choices.”

There is a dearth of senior women in Silicon Valley so the perks offered by Apple and Facebook could be seen as an attempt to rectify the gender imbalance. Apple said in its diversity report this year that its workforce was 70% male, while Facebook reported its workforce was 69% male.

The idea of freezing eggs was first proposed for cancer patients as chemotherapy can damage a woman’s eggs.

The idea behind “fertility preservation” is that by removing and fertilising their eggs in their 20s, women will have a better chance of becoming pregnant in their 30s and 40s. Fertility often declines in women’s 30s.