Egg-freezing is a controversial issue, but some high-profile technology companies have decided to offer ovary-freezing services for women so that those female employees may better focus on their careers. Proponents of the procedure say that it gives women more control over their fertility choices, and naysayers claim that this option perpetuates the idea that women need to postpone having children in order to perform the best in their workplaces. The BBC quotes some supporters of the procedure:
"Anything that gives women more control over the timing of fertility is going to be helpful to professional women,'' Shelley Correll, a sociology professor and director of the Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University, told the news agency AP.
"It potentially addresses the conflicts between the biological clock and the clockwork of women's careers: the time that's most important in work, for getting your career established, often coincides with normal fertility time for women. This can potentially help resolve that by pushing women's fertility into the future.'
Dr Simon Thornton, group medical director at Care Fertility, a chain of fertility clinics based mainly in the UK, says that many women make the mistake of equating physical fitness with egg fitness.
"Many women are shocked to find that although they are physically fit their egg quality is actually poor, and that if they had frozen their eggs in their early 30s the picture would have been very different," he says.
"It is a very good thing that companies are seeing it as part of their responsibility to their dedicated female employees and that forward-looking companies like Facebook are actually doing something about it."
Facebook and Apple, for their parts, have long offered benefits for both fertility treatments and adoption. Facebook gives its new parents "baby cash": $4,000 to use for clothing, diapers, or whatever else they like. Egg-freezing is now an addition to that package.
So while the companies' inclusion of egg-freezing as a health benefit may certainly be part of the Valley's notorious perks arms race, you could also read it as a sign that egg-freezing has reached a kind of cultural normalcy. In 2008, the American Society of Reproductive Medicine called the technique "experimental," warning, based on current evidence, that it "should only be offered in that context." In 2012, however, citing sufficient evidence to "demonstrate acceptable success rates in young highly selected populations," it lifted that designation.
Since then, according to NBC's Danielle Friedman, doctors have seen a steady increase in the number of women who have sought out the procedure. In New York and San Francisco, she notes, fertility doctors report a near doubling in requests for it over the past year alone. And advocates and facilitators of egg-freezing—firms and forums with names like Eggsurance, Extend Fertility, and, yep, EggBannxx—claim that Facebook and Apple aren't alone in their egg-freezing offerings: Large law, consulting, and finance firms, they say, are also starting to cover the costs of the procedure for their employees. (If so, though, those companies aren't being public about it.)
Inducing employees to freeze their eggs to defer motherhood takes this social dynamic in an altogether different direction. Setting aside the invasive and uncertain nature of the treatment that is on offer, it implies that employees should adapt their lifestyles to fit in with the desire of companies for a disruption-free office. This change of behaviour can be secured in return for the payment of a one-off fee.
Some women may choose quite legitimately to freeze their eggs to defer pregnancy and pursue their careers. It is one reason why these services have developed. The concern is that once a company begins to offer this as an off-the-shelf benefit, the message will go out that this is not so much an option as a preferred solution. Given the intensely personal nature of the decision when to start a family, this feels both intrusive and creepy.
Companies will always seek to find ways to encourage their employees to fit in with the demands of the business in what is an ever more competitive landscape. But managers should be wary of intruding too far. Women should be taking decisions about when and whether to have children entirely of their own free will – not because of a nudge they might have received from their employers.
