Facebook And Apple Pay For Egg Freezing

We all know Silicon Valley mega companies Facebook and Apple have an array of benefits for employees, such as free lunches, yoga classes and dry cleaning at their leisure. But things just got one step above the typical workers benefits. Apple and Facebook are offering up to $20,000 in benefits to help their employees pay for infertility treatments, such as freezing one's eggs.

This comes at a time when the generation of hardworking career women has skyrocketed, and the tech companies see a need to care for the sensitive subject of a women's biological clock compared to her career clock.

"Anything that gives women more control over the timing of fertility is going to be helpful to professional women," explained Shelly Correll, a sociology professor and director of the Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University, via the Associated Press.

Brigitte Adams, an egg-freezing advocate, told NBC News that "having a high-powered career and children is still a very hard thing to do."

So what's the going rate for freezing one's eggs, and what's the procedure that follows?

The procedure costs an upward of $10,000, plus storage costs of hundreds of dollars a year. When it's time for one to retrieve their eggs and become pregnant, it costs a further several thousand dollars to thaw, fertilize and implant the eggs into the womb.

The notoriously male-dominated Silicon Valley ups its competition in finding top female talent, and this coverage may give the companies leverage into hardworking women.

"We want to empower women at Apple to do the best work of their lives as they care for loved ones and raise their families," the company said in a statement to ABC News. "We continue to expand our benefits for women, with a new extended maternity leave policy, along with cryopreservation and egg storage as part of our extensive support for infertility treatments."