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Apple and Facebook want to freeze your eggs

If Apple and Facebook are serious about attracting and sustaining female workers in tech, the companies will have to do more than pay for women to have their…

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Apple and Facebook think they’ve found a solution to get more women in leadership positions — freeze their biological clocks.

Egg freezing is the next in a long list of benefits at tech companies that most American workers could only dream of — especially in a country where workers barely have parental leave. Facebook parents can take four months off after having or adopting kid and get $4,000 in condition-free “baby cash." Both companies say that they offer some flexibility in terms of hours worked in the office and at home. And now, the companies plan to pay women's egg-freezing fees up to $20,000, painting the move as the next form of family planning to empower women to take charge of their careers.

So with all these great benefits, why do women account for fewer than 30 percent of leaders at tech companies like Apple and Facebook?

According to U.S. Census data, the majority of women (88 percent) who chose to freeze their eggs said that they did so because they haven’t found a partner, not because they thought children would interfere with their career. While it may be a great health benefit, egg fertilization is not likely to bring about gender equality because it has little to do with why women aren't leaders in Silicon Valley. 

A 2013 study by Cornell University found that gender barriers prompt women to leave STEM jobs rather than family obligations. In fact, most women leave the field long before the time that they would consider freezing their eggs.

“Our work indicates that a substantial proportion of women who are trained in STEM, and begin working in STEM jobs, rapidly exit such jobs,” the study’s co-author Sharon Sassler said. “Additional attention is needed to the field of STEM itself to better understand why so many of the highly skilled workers trained – at great expense – for these fields are exiting.”

Some of those barriers include isolation due to a lack of female workers, workplace discrimination, an absence of mentors and, as a result, an unclear career trajectory. Right now, fewer than 20 percent of workers the tech side of companies like Apple and Facebook are women.

As far as egg freezing goes, some female employees worry that the companies' cultures will twist the benefit into another barrier. If women are expected to put off having kids, those who choose to have children young could be stigmatized — not for starting a family, as many male employees do, but for starting a family as a woman. 

 
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