Employers who offer women egg freezing benefits are delaying families and padding their bottom lines
, a sociologist told the Washington Examiner.
A company’s “incentive is to maximize the worker’s time and commitment to the job and minimize their investments in their own family including when it comes to having family in the first place,” University of Virginia sociology professor W. Bradford Wilcox said.
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“There are a lot of so-called work-family policies [that] are really more about being pro-work and anti-family,” he continued. “They’re about making things easier for the employer and really basically eroding an ordinary American’s ability to be the spouse or parent that they should be.”
In vitro fertilization and egg freezing have skyrocketed in popularity as part of fertility benefits packages aimed at attracting more women to the workforce. With 42% of companies covering IVF and 19% covering egg freezing, these packages are used to boost a company’s diversity, equity, and inclusion numbers and encourage women to delay starting families to optimize the company’s medium- to long-term investment in their female employees.
“The employer is basically trying to get the employee to kick the can down the road so that in the moment they’re fully attached to the job,” explained Wilcox, director of UVA’s National Marriage Project. “But the consequence of this is that the longer you wait to have kids, the more likely it is you won’t have them. These are the kinds of policies that are helping to explain why, you know, the fertility rate in the U.S. is at a record low.”
He continued: “It’s sold as a work-family policy, but it’s really about minimizing women’s opportunities to have kids in the prime years when it’s easiest for them to have children.”
Employers see motherhood as a burden, as women have historically left the workforce to care for their children. The share of women in the workforce decreases by 18% in the quarter they have their first child, and that number decreases with more children, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
It is a “huge expense to lose a good worker to parenthood,” Wilcox said, because companies invest time, resources, and money on training and cultivation. “That expense is effectively a lot greater than the cost of freezing her eggs.”
Companies have more recently started to pursue anti-family policies packaged as social justice and pro-women improvements, Wilcox said. He compared the egg freezing policy to the move by major corporations to pay for women to go out of state to seek abortions after Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization overturned Roe v. Wade.
“We had a lot of companies that were you offering to pay for abortion — thousands of dollars’ worth of expenses,” Wilcox said. “I don’t think that they would have offered a similar amount of money to moms who decided to take whatever parental leave was on the books.”
He explained there exists a “perfect storm” of social justice signaling and profit motive in which “the elite culture’s ideas about choice and what’s virtuous is aligning with the corporate bottom line in a very convenient way.”
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Wilcox explained that delaying families has significant societal impacts beyond the sharp decrease in the U.S. fertility rate.
“Outcomes of policies and cultural norms like the ones that are being promulgated here are profoundly worrisome because strong families are fundamental to Americans’ emotional, social, and even economic well-being,” he said. “If you’re discouraging Americans from going ahead and having kids in a timely way, you’re eroding the foundations of American family life.”
