Did Apple and Facebook lay an egg? Or do something great?

[zelticgar]

FB - Facebook has about 7200 employees with a 31% female population. 10% participation of female employees would mean about 225 female employees participants. I'd be shocked if participation rate was higher that than 10%.

I'm kind of curious about the benefit only applying to female employees. I figured they would also offer it to spouses of male employees. They may be piloting it first to see what sort of participation they get.

[TerraPrime]

This saddens me. Not the fact that Apple and Facebook made this offer. But that there are apparently so many people that would be willing to take it up. Willing to place their ambitions of "making it up the corporate ladder" above having kids at a time when you can still enjoy as much of life as possible with them.

Who the hell cares about the "corporate ladder" when they are on their deathbeds one day? But the kids you spent cherished time with, that sure as hell counts for a lot when the Grim Reaper is about to arrive.

What a world we live in.

EDIT

And since it might not be clear from my above post, I view males that place the "corporate ladder" above their families just as negatively as I do females that do so.

Well, that's all good, FOR YOU. Some people do place equal importance, or more importance, in their careers. There's nothing wrong with that. Each person should have the freedom to prioritize the competing needs in their lives according to their own personalities. It's not "sad" that someone might find doing well in their careers, as defined as climbing the corporate ladder, as more important during a certain period of their lives. There are plenty of people who don't want kids at all, you know.

[Inigima]

That's a weird post, Terra, especially since that isn't exactly under assault.

[Pendergraft]

Of course another band-aid answer to gender equality in the work place. What about the benefits of women who are in their late 30's, climbed the proverbial ladder and didn't freeze their egg in their 20's? And how did they compute up to $20,000? Is this just the process of freezing the eggs exactly? The cost of thawing and re-freezing an egg is a $1,000 each depending on the fertility clinic.

And what is the use of freezing the egg for 10 to 15 years when you don't have the benefits of a successful live birth? Is IVF or Surrogacy included in the benefits or separate? What about the ancillary items, like testing, monitoring, medication, transfer and procedure costs of the egg? What about the option of a fertility specialist? Since genetically women in their late 30's have a harder time conceiving normaly than their 25yr old counter part.

I'm kind of curious about the benefit only applying to female employees. I figured they would also offer it to spouses of male employees. They may be piloting it first to see what sort of participation they get.

why don't they offer one year in maternity/paternity leave, day-care at the office and work from home options instead.

This would be a great benefit if its all encompassing female employees, spouses of male employees & employees already with children. But then again it might be too "expensive" for a billion dollar company.

[JoannaL]

I think the companies figure that most women will take this new "freedom" of putting pregnany of to wait as long as possible. A woman can theoretically bear children until 50 or even 60. If a considerable amout wait that long then the company wins young, cheap and highly productive empolyees and only loose old, expensive and less motivated ones. So this means big win for the companies. For the woman and children on the other hand this means a lot more dangerous health risks, but who cares...

[kairparavel]

It's nice to know that at the end of the day, no matter how it's framed (benefit, perk) a woman is still going to be judged by her willingness (or lack of) to incubate a fetus, only now during an arbitrarily deemed appropriate window. So on top of the pressures of when to have kids there is the added pressure to have not one, but two invasive procedures to ensure it's 'the right time'. * And yes, there is added bonus of risk factor to the health of the mother/child based on age at time of pregancy. So generous.

You know what a breakthrough in equality would be? Allowing paternity leave (not maternity leave) that would allow true equality - either or both parents taking time from work to raise their family and potentially destroy their careers in equal measure. That would be truly refreshing.

[zelticgar]

I've heard a lot of griping on this thread about inequality in how we handle leave policies in the US. I'm curious about what would encompass a fair leave policy for birth? Its been awhile since i had kids but i recall that when my wife had our first two she got 6 weeks paid, 6 extra weeks unpaid and then they let her use 2 weeks vacation time. Then she got them to give her 6 weeks work from home. The company then agreed to let her work from home 3 days a week. It was a really good deal and they treated her amazingly. I've seen these scenarios play out many times over throughout my career with coworkers and friends as well. Maybe I'm living in LaLa land but I just have not really experienced much of a challenge with leave programs (although i would have liked to have gotten a little more time off)

Back on topic - I did some more digging and the benefits program FB and Apple is offering DOES APPLY to spouses as well. This expands the population who would use this program significantly and will likely help many people outside the direct employment of the company. I was not surprised this was the case because it would be unusual to offer a benefit but not allow spouses to participate.

[kairparavel]

I've heard a lot of griping on this thread about inequality in how we handle leave policies in the US. I'm curious about what would encompass a fair leave policy for birth? Its been awhile since i had kids but i recall that when my wife had our first two she got 6 weeks paid, 6 extra weeks unpaid and then they let her use 2 weeks vacation time. Then she got them to give her 6 weeks work from home. The company then agreed to let her work from home 3 days a week. It was a really good deal and they treated her amazingly. I've seen these scenarios play out many times over throughout my career with coworkers and friends as well. Maybe I'm living in LaLa land but I just have not really experienced much of a challenge with leave programs (although i would have liked to have gotten a little more time off)

How much paternity time did you get/take?

[zelticgar]

I think I took a week for both babies after we took them home from the hospital. One of the kids was born right after I started working at my old employer. I was still training and really did not want to take much time anyway because I needed to get ramped up. I was able to work from home pretty much from day 1 although I actually went in the office more after the kids were born because it was a little too crazy at home to get work done :)

When my 3rd was born I took about 10 days off which is the most time I have ever taken since I started working.

[kairparavel]

I think I took a week for both babies after we took them home from the hospital. One of the kids was born right after I started working at my old employer. I was still training and really did not want to take much time anyway because I needed to get ramped up. I was able to work from home pretty much from day 1 although I actually went in the office more after the kids were born because it was a little too crazy at home to get work done :)

When my 3rd was born I took about 10 days off which is the most time I have ever taken since I started working.

I just want to mention that each set of parents need to figure out what works best. You clearly did what was best for you and that's all that matters. But if something different was best for you, would have been paternity leave for you that matched your wife?

The conversation always revolves around what the birth mother will get (or not get) and not every employer is as generous with leave or flexible schedules. Paternity leave allows families to make decisions on what benefits their situation financially, professionally etc. Are fathers allowed to take the same kind of leave as mothers? Would a male employee be given as seemingly generous deal as your wife? This might seem off topic, but I don't think it is because the conversation - eggs, preganancy, leave etc all seem to revolve around birth mothers and not parents. Are adoptive parents given the same opportunities for leave? Same sex parents? There's more to consider about family and family leave than just giving birth, so while allowing this frozen egg thing seems like some generous deal, it doesn't really change anything and kinda sets the idea about parenting back some because it continues the focus on the decisions of the potential birth mothers out there not to tank their career.

[Starkess]

I don't have a problem with it. Provides more options for women and allows those options to be somewhat less beholden to biology.

[TerraPrime]

Re: Zeltigar

The fairness issue is not about how much time off do women get for childbirth, imo. The fairness issue is about how to evaluate a female employee's contribution to the company and her impact on her job if she decides to become pregnant and have a child. The fear that the female employees are expressing is not that they won't get enough time off to nurse the baby. The fear is that they would be seen as less reliable, less dedicated to their jobs, and less competent, for deciding to have a baby. These are the issues that impact advancement of women at the workforce, not how many weeks off they get from birthing a baby.

In most academic institutes, female pre-tenure faculty can get an extension on their tenure clock for pregnancy an childbirth. I think some will also grant a father the same consideration, though this is less prevalent from what I hear. I tried digging around for a formal investigation on this but I can't find any. I am not aware if the granting agencies, whose decisions impact nearly all STEM field academics, also offer extensions on progress reprots for grants or not. I think types of consideration like this are what we need to reassure female employees that their decision to raise a family will not negatively impact their career aspirations.

Re: Kair

I think there's a fine line between "focusing the decision back on women" and "recognizing the undue burdens on women on family planning and offering options to help." I think this policy can be seen in both lights.

[Shryke]

I've heard a lot of griping on this thread about inequality in how we handle leave policies in the US. I'm curious about what would encompass a fair leave policy for birth? Its been awhile since i had kids but i recall that when my wife had our first two she got 6 weeks paid, 6 extra weeks unpaid and then they let her use 2 weeks vacation time. Then she got them to give her 6 weeks work from home. The company then agreed to let her work from home 3 days a week. It was a really good deal and they treated her amazingly. I've seen these scenarios play out many times over throughout my career with coworkers and friends as well. Maybe I'm living in LaLa land but I just have not really experienced much of a challenge with leave programs (although i would have liked to have gotten a little more time off)

Honestly, the fact that you consider this "a really good deal" is goddamn sad imo.

Canada is 1 year paid leave for anyone at 55% up to a certain amount a week and I would describe that as adequate at best. It deals with almost none of the social issues TP mentions above and still puts undue burden on the women to do all the sacrifice.

This whole thing is, again, a way to avoid the issue of dealing with workplace discrimination against women and general child-rearing by framing the issue as "well, women are just having kids too early in their careers".

[Eponine]

This saddens me. Not the fact that Apple and Facebook made this offer. But that there are apparently so many people that would be willing to take it up. Willing to place their ambitions of "making it up the corporate ladder" above having kids at a time when you can still enjoy as much of life as possible with them.

That's a big assumption that the women who might be willing to take it up are either happily married or in a situation where they would want to be single parents. When I was a 25 year old programmer, I was newly divorced, ambivalent about children, and in no way whatsoever had any desire to be a single mother. Nor did I want to shelf my ambitions in favor of desperately trying to find a man who'd marry me and father my children. BUT, despite thinking that I probably wouldn't want to have children, I'd have still appreciated a workplace benefit of being able to freeze my eggs at that age. It would have been an amazing benefit. That's not to say that it's a substitute for maternity/paternity leave or singlehandedly can bring equality to the workplace. But I think the condescension toward women who have other priorities at 25 than children is incredibly misplaced. Not everyone is at the right place in life to have children in their 20s, not just because of climbing the ladder but because of a million possible life circumstances that make waiting a better choice.

[mcbigski]

It sounds like an extremely expensive solution that only applies to a very thin slice of privileged people, all to fix a rather basic and universal problem with how the workplace functions in our society.

Mostly Wrong. It's purely a cost saving measure that doesn't apply to the median or below employee. This way they can shame women who take leave to have kids right now as being insufficiently dedicated to the corporation. If egg freezing costs 20k, it's way cheaper to pay for that than to pay for maternity leave for employees above a certain pay grade.

Is there an assumption (in creating the policy) that, by the time a women decides to use her frozen eggs, she would have moved on to a different company ?

I'm sure the actuarial consultants have had that decrement priced in before they signed off on this policy.

The raionale of the program, far as I can tell, is to offer female employees an extra tool for planning a balance between family needs and job needs. It is not intended to completely obviate the need for maternity leaves. Rather, it is aimed to (I think) empower female employees to make the choice about when to start a family in ways that they see fit and not in ways that are dictated/pressured by biological concerns.

Bullshit. The rationale is that it's better for the corporation to keep their female employees working 40+ hours a week instead of having them have kids and cutting back their hours. If you think it's about empowering women instead of the bottom line, then I suppose I admire your idealism a little bit.

[rozemarijn]

Actually, the whole thing isn't true. There is no 'intention' behind the program. They have a health insurance pack and it got upgraded, one of the things upon the list is this specific option, as are other infertility treatments. So they did not just decide to offer this to attract female employees, but it is just one of the additions to the health pack, which happens every few months. Somewhere it was blown up, but it isn't really a story...

[Sci-2]

Feminism’s Tipping Point: Who Wins from Leaning in?

If resistance to working harder is the problem, then it follows that work is a solution. Work will save us; but, the reader may be asking, from what?

The fact that Lean In is really waging a battle for work and against unmonetized life is the reason pregnancy, or the state of reproducing life, looms as the corporate Battle of Normandy in Lean In. Pregnancy, by virtue of the body’s physical focus on human reproduction, is humanity’s last, biological stand against the corporate demand for workers’ continuous labor. For Sandberg, pregnancy must be converted into a corporate opportunity: a moment to convince a woman to commit further to her job. Human life as a competitor to work is the threat here, and it must be captured for corporate use, much in the way that Facebook treats users’ personal activities as a series of opportunities to fill out the Facebook-owned social graph.

By arguing that women should express their feminism by remaining in the workplace at all costs, Sandberg encourages women to maintain a commitment to the workplace without encouraging the workplace to maintain a commitment to them. And by launching a feminist platform, Sandberg is able to contain the broader threat that a feminist critique poses to Facebook’s business, simultaneously generating more power for herself and her organization — Silicon Valley “revolution” at its finest. This maneuver, as I learned in my years at Facebook, is how the game is played, and both Sandberg and Zuckerberg play it well. The question the rest of us have to ask is, what does the game do for those not at or near the top? Are workers playing or are we getting played?

Lean In’s goal is to push women forward into their work so as to overcome what Sandberg represents as women’s universal internal resistance to career velocity.

Sandberg’s language in this chapter, while directed at women, recalls and even replicates the language deployed at Facebook to push its employees to work harder. At Facebook, the offices are festooned with posters that read things like “Be Bold,” “Move fast and break things,” “Done is better than perfect,” and “What would you do if you weren’t afraid?” Facebook’s corporate imperative to move quickly and gain influence over more people, figured in a Formula One vocabulary of speed and victory, is repeated in Sandberg’s writing. “When more people get in the race, more records will be broken,” and, “Don’t put on the brakes. Accelerate. Keep your foot on the gas pedal.”

Life is a race, Sandberg is telling us, and the way to win is through the perpetual acceleration of one’s own labor: moving forward, faster. The real antagonist identified by Lean In then is not institutionalized discrimination against women, but women’s reluctance to accept accelerating career demands.

Sandberg has penned not so much a new Feminine Mystique as an updated Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Where other feminists focus on articulating the amount of free or underpaid labor that women do, Sandberg places a priceless value on labor itself and encourages more of it, whether paid, unpaid, or poorly paid. “If you’re offered a seat on a rocket ship, you don’t ask which seat,” she says, quoting advice she received from Google executive Eric Schmidt.