Facebook explains its controversial free egg-freezing policy

PanARMENIAN.Net - Back in 2014, Facebook and Apple announced new schemes to pay for female employees' eggs to be frozen, Digital Spy reports.

Some criticised the policy for encouraging women to put their careers ahead of becoming a mother.

But now Facebook's COO Sheryl Sandberg has revealed that the social network actually started covering employees up to $20,000 to freeze their eggs because of a woman who had cancer.

"There is a young woman working at Facebook who had got cancer," Sandberg explained to Bloomberg.

"I knew her and she came to me and said I'm going to get treatment and that means I wont be able to have children unless I can freeze my eggs and I can't afford it but our medical care doesn't cover it."

Sandberg believed the company should pay for worker's eggs to be frozen and decided to discuss the idea with Facebook's head of human resources.

"We stopped and looked at each other and said why would we only cover this for women with cancer why wouldn't we cover this more broadly and that was where that benefit came from, and we think it's great."

Facebook's egg freezing scheme is part of a wider benefits package, which gives working families more flexibility, as well as paternity and maternity leave for four months, whether they chose to have their own children or adopt. Plus, employees are offered a lump sum baby gift.

"The 'have it all language' is only applied to women. Having it all means to have children and have work, we assume men can have both and they do," she added.

"The problem is we assume women can't but women do, and have to - 70% of mothers in the United States are in the workforce because they have to be, so telling women constantly, 'you can't have it all, you can't have it all' is not helpful because they have to be parents and work.

"It turns out fathers have to work and be parents too. Right now, work does not work for parents, both men and women get discouraged from leaving [the office]. Men [worry they're] not going to be seen as serious if they go home to be with a child."