Employer funded egg freezing: an advance for women in the workplace or a return to the unencumbered employee?

This paper critically examines employer-funded egg freezing for female employees. It argues that the market-based approach to egg-freezing is highly problematic and does not sufficiently address existing workplace barriers and institutional obstacles affecting women's reproductive choices. Section two scrutinizes the cultural/social context of women's rights in the workplace. The third section examines feminist critiques of employer paid egg-freezing. It explores perspectives of the pregnant body and its acceptance or unacceptance in the domain of work. Section four investigates employer egg-freezing utilising a feminist-institutionalist framework as a conceptual tool for revealing and analysing the visible and invisible institutional pressures that shape decision making particularly for female employees in respect of their reproductive lives. This paper concludes that if employer-funded egg-freezing is to provide genuine benefits to female employees, it must be situated within the context of social and institutional reform that properly integrates pregnancy and reproductive choices into the workplace.