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Millennial Workers Choose Fertility Benefits Over Free Beer
As young employees delay having children, Ping-Pong tables and kombucha have been replaced by coverage for IVF and egg freezing
Shaliza Kassam probably wouldn’t have frozen her eggs this year if her employer-based health insurance hadn’t covered it.
The Chicago-based 29-year-old knows that becoming a mother is in her plans for the future. But like many other millennials, what she doesn’t know is when or how that’s going to happen — so when Shaliza learned that LinkedIn, her employer of five years, offered generous coverage for egg freezing, she jumped at the opportunity. She was 28 years old at the time.
“I have a lot of friends in their thirties or forties, and they talk a lot about how hard it is or was for them to start their families,” she says. Shaliza hopes to start her own business before becoming pregnant, which she may not try to do until her thirties or forties. To her, egg freezing represented a better shot at a healthy pregnancy later on. And while a single cycle of egg freezing, which ideally yields at least 15 eggs, can cost more than $15,000 out of pocket, Shaliza reports that she paid less than $1,000 for her cycle. “I would have been a little more hesitant to take $16,000 out of my savings account to do this versus LinkedIn providing the benefit,” she says.
LinkedIn is one of a growing handful of companies, many of which are in the tech sector, that help employees pay for a variety of assisted reproductive technologies. In addition to egg freezing, LinkedIn also offers coverage for in vitro fertilization, as well as adoption and even surrogacy. In 2017, TechCrunch named it one of the 10 tech companies with the best fertility benefits thanks to LinkedIn’s policy of covering up to $100,000 of IVF; the company consistently ranks highly in FertilityIQ’s Family Builder Workplace Index, which grades companies on the generosity of their fertility benefits.
Other companies are following suit. At the extreme end, some, such as Tesla, don’t even put a dollar limit on their IVF coverage. Broader trends show that 31% of U.S. employers with at least 500 employees now offer fertility benefits of some kind, up from 24% in 2016…
