Yahoo – AFP,
Fabienne Faur, 19 Oct 2014
 |
Free meals,
four months of maternity leave and now egg-freezing: Facebook's
latest gift to
its employees has rekindled debate on the role of women in the
company (AFP
Photo/Emmanuel Dunand)
|
Washington
(AFP) - Free meals, four months of maternity leave and now egg-freezing:
Facebook's latest gift to its employees has rekindled debate on the role of
women in the company.
The move
aims to at the very least show that "we have a lot of work to do to help
companies really understand what they need to do," said Carolyn Leighton,
who founded WITI, a network of women working in the tech sector.
As for
paying to have eggs frozen -- which allows women to put off having children --
she dismissed the idea as "ridiculous."
"My
phone has been ringing off the hook with women who found it insulting,"
Leighton said.
"They
felt they were just trying to deflect the conversation about equal pay for
women," she said, recalling that in the United States, a woman doing the
same job as a man earns 77 percent what he does.
That is
apparently not the goal of Facebook, known among companies in Silicon Valley
for its groundbreaking ideas on personnel management, in offering this coverage
up to $20,000.
"We
take care of all our employees and the people who matter most to them,"
said a Facebook spokesman, outlining the company's health care benefits.
There is no
universal, government-funded health care program in the United States, and most
Americans get their health care from their employer.
At
Facebook, the benefits include fertility treatment, surrogate mothers for
homosexual couples and sperm bank access. This is all on top of three free
meals a day at the office, a medical care in situ and a car wash.
'Generous' maternity leave'
"We
don't have women-specific benefits. We have benefits for people at
Facebook," the spokesman said, insisting that the four-month maternity
leave is quite generous in a country where much shorter periods are often
granted.
Apple,
which will start paying for egg freezing in January, said it wanted to give its
workers the power to make their lives productive as they take care of their
loved ones and raise their children.
 |
Apple,
which will start paying for egg freezing in January, said it wanted to give
its
workers the power to make their lives productive as they take care of their
loved ones and raise their children (AFP Photo/Timothy A. Clary)
|
"Surely
what they meant to say was, 'We want women at Apple to spend more of their
lives working for us without a family to distract them,'" Jessica Cussins
of the Center for Genetics and Society wrote in a Huffington Post editorial.
But Chavi
Eve Karkowsky, an obstetrician in New York, wrote in the online magazine Slate
that when it comes to delayed child bearing, "the two factors that come up
again and again are financial stability and the availability of an appropriate
partner."
Of the
second factor, she added "this is the one that I think creates the
egg-freezing push."
The
procedure that was once mostly used by people with cancer is not harmless and
its results not guaranteed.
The debate
has rekindled the controversy over women in the workplace, a key issue for the
women's liberation movement.
A week ago,
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella was forced to apologize after advising women to
trust their "karma" rather than be assertive and ask for a raise.
Last year,
Facebook's chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg published "Lean
In," a memoir presented as a modern feminist manifest in which she urged
women to work to succeed in juggling their careers and family life.
Women make
up 50.8 percent of the US population and 47 percent of the workforce. But they
account for only 16.6 percent of senior positions in the workplace and 8.1
percent of the highest paying jobs, according to the Center for American
Progress.
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