From egg freezing to home-delivering your breast milk, American companies are rapidly joining a fertility ‘arms-race’ to offer their female employees the best perks around.
Australian companies, however, haven’t really jumped on the bandwagon. Here at home female recruitment incentives seem more focused on maternity leave, training and mentoring.
So why isn’t Australia following suit?
Partly, it’s because many of the fertility perks offered to American employees are provided through their private health insurance, which large American companies are already funding. Australia doesn’t share this strong tradition of employer-funded healthcare.
Also, fertility benefits have largely emerged from the tech industry, as a way of attracting great talent in a competitive marketplace. Perhaps they’ll similarly surface in competitive Australian industries in the future.
But the rise of fertility perks has also generated controversy. When Apple and Facebook announced they’re funding employees’ $20,000 egg freezing procedures, the internet exploded in debate around the ethical implications.
Was this a cynical ploy to corner women into working more, and for longer, unconstrained by the pesky time bomb of their ovaries? Or was it a radical move that could level the gender playing field, giving women the freedom to choose motherhood at a time that doesn’t jeopardise their careers? Was it a PR stunt to correct the perception of tech companies as female-unfriendly? Or was it a genuinely progressive move to de-stigmatise the procedure?
While the conspiracy theories are appealing, it’s likely that the real reason is the more mundane equation that driven career women wanted egg freezing, and tech giants want these women.
Regardless of the companies’ intentions, ethical questions remain. Is it the place of private enterprise to manage women’s fertility?
These questions will no doubt be asked more and more as corporate fertility perks gain traction around the world.
Below are five perks that are on the rise, and what they mean for women.
1. Breast milk delivery
As we’ve written before, breast milk plus work can be a messy equation. Women who’ve waded into this territory will be familiar with challenges like trying to find a quiet space to breast pump without the risk of interruption. Then there’s the mortifying potential for confusion over breast-milk stored in the work fridge. As a result, Curtin University reports that returning to work is the most common reason why mothers stop breastfeeding before six months, despite the significant health benefits of breast-milk for babies.
So, IBM took the innovative step last year of announcing a service for female employees, safely delivering their breast milk home to baby, in a temperature controlled package. We’d love to see the company go one step further and offer options for mothers to nurse in the office like Google, but it’s a great start.
2. Egg freezing
Although Apple and Facebook attracted the most attention for funding female employees’ egg freezing, they’re not alone, as more and more companies adopt the practice, like corporate giants Citigroup and JP Morgan Chase. While egg freezing is becoming increasingly popular, the process remains relatively “fringe” and somewhat stigmatised. As Time put it:
There’s something about the mere idea of a healthy single female freezing her eggs that seems to play into every last trope: the desperate woman, on the prowl for a baby daddy. The woman who has failed the one true test of her femininity: her ability to reproduce. The hard-headed careerist who is wiling to pay to put off the ticking of her biological clock. That or – god forbid – the women who ends up single, childless and alone.
And yet egg freezing can revolutionise women’s lives, not just those with serious medical conditions like endometriosis that compromise fertility. Not only does egg freezing help women plan motherhood around their careers, it also takes the pressure off finding the “right” father in the narrow window of “peak fertility”.
For corporations, egg freezing makes economic sense. Freezing eggs that women produce earlier in life brings higher success rates with IVF. This means less rounds of treatment are required, which American corporations are mandated to fund in many states.
3. Infertility insurance
Fifteen American states now require employer-funded healthcare to include infertility services like IVF. However many states fall behind. According to the 2014 employee benefits report by the Society for Human Resource Management, 84% of US organisations provide health insurance coverage for contraception, but only 29% cover infertility options.
As a result, women are campaigning for their workplaces to cover them, using resources supplied by advocacy organisations like Resolve. And this approach is working. When Resolve surveyed 900 companies offering infertility insurance in 2006, they reported that the main reason they’d adopted it was because an employee requested it.
4. Surrogacy and adoption services
Google, Apple, Microsoft and other big tech names cover adoption services, with some even covering the costs of surrogacy services and leave. Non-tech companies like Goldman Sachs and Whole Foods offer similar perks.
These companies recognise their employees are having children in diverse ways. From same-sex parents to stay-at-home dads, to couples who can’t conceive at all, the big American names are offering a smorgasbord of flexible parenting entitlements.
5. Childcare
Childcare is another benefit gaining traction in the employee perks arms race, offered by companies like Google. While onsite childcare remains relatively rare, employers are subsidizing off-site childcare costs through childcare plans.
Back here in Australia, childcare affordability features heavily in conversations of how to get mothers to stay in the workforce. And it needs to remain front and centre in the conversation. There’s no use in American companies helping women to conceive if those employees are prevented from returning to their desks. Meanwhile, Scandinavian countries have prioritised universal childcare for decades, often free or charged proportionally to parents’ income. This is partly why they have the highest rates of working mothers in the world.
So, where to from here?
While these five perks could attract and retain more working women, they must be part of a larger picture, that includes social solutions like shorter or more flexible work hours, mentoring and promoting women, tackling unconscious sexist bias in hiring, and getting men to share in paid parental leave.
It will be interesting to see which, if any, of these entitlements reach Australian shores. But one thing is clear: whether or not it should be the role of corporations, they’re becoming key players in the complex arena of women, fertility and the workplace.