VANCOUVER — Alyssa Atkins froze her eggs when she was 29 years old. An executive at a fast-growing startup dating someone four years her junior, she felt rushed into thinking about motherhood. She paid $15,000 for what felt to her like a freedom that biology only affords men. “I was like, ‘Oh my God, is this how dudes feel just walking around on the Earth?’” she said. “They get to just do whatever they want.”

Atkins, now 31, has since founded Toronto-based Lilia, a concierge service that walks women through the sometimes convoluted egg-freezing process. With a recent bump in demand for egg-freezing procedures, she said Lilia is fielding inquiries from a host of North American companies looking to add the firm’s concierge egg-freezing services as an employee benefit.

Egg freezing attempts to circumvent a woman’s biological clock. Some women use it as a means of delaying motherhood until an opportune time in their life, like after accomplishing a career goal or finishing a degree. Others turn to it for medical reasons, as might someone with cancer whose treatment plan may impact their fertility.

The procedure sees a doctor retrieve eggs from a woman’s body, which are cooled and preserved for future impregnation. It’s an expensive pursuit. One Western Canadian chain of fertility clinics estimates costs between $10,000 and $14,000 for an egg-freezing cycle and medications. It charges an additional $500 annual storage fee after the first year and between $6,250 and $7,300 to thaw an egg and inject it with sperm in the hopes of a successful pregnancy.

In 2014 Facebook and Apple made headlines when they became among the first major U.S. employers to offer staff money for egg freezing. After two years of COVID-19 lockdowns and restrictions, Atkins found women are now “really interested” in the procedure. She suggests some women feel they lost two reproductive years due to the pandemic, which may have ended their relationships or paused dating altogether. They now feel a sense of urgency to preserve their eggs and buy more time. While Atkins said the U.S. is the source of most of Lilia’s current business—employers there have realized that women want their workplaces to “care about their reproductive autonomy and family building on their own timeline,” she said—Canadian tech companies are increasingly starting to cover some of the costs of egg freezing for their workers.

“I’m pretty sure a few of [our employees] cried … because they were so excited,” said Amanda Nagy, director of people operations at Thinkific. The Vancouver-based online-learning company significantly increased its fertility coverage this year, upping the lifetime maximum support available for employees from $2,400 to $15,000. That can cover fertility treatments to aid pregnancy, such as in vitro fertilization (IVF) and intrauterine insemination (IUI), or those that put it off, such as egg or sperm freezing.

In quarterly surveys where Thinkific staff can weigh in on perks and benefits, they told the company they wanted more funding for fertility treatments. Some employees also approached human resources directly, said Nagy, with questions on what coverage existed for family planning. “We did see a greater need to provide a more comprehensive plan,” she said.

Hootsuite, a Vancouver-based social-media management company, started to offer fertility treatments for Canadian employees in 2021 with a lifetime maximum of $12,000 available for procedures including egg freezing. Twenty-six employees have dipped into these fertility-treatment funds so far, said Paul Dhillon, the company’s director of total rewards.

Hootsuite made the change after engaging consultants to revamp its benefits package with an eye toward diversity, equity and inclusion. “We want to be inclusive of all different types of families,” Dhillon said. The consultants told Hootsuite that many companies were considering egg-freezing benefits, and that offering them would make it a market leader.

Alida, a Toronto-based customer-experience management and insights company, has since 2018 offered Canadian employees $10,000 toward fertility treatments, including egg freezing, and $5,000 toward fertility drugs in one of its benefits plans for employees. The goal is inclusivity. “Most women at a certain age group are working hard in their careers and so they put off having children,” said Hermina Khara, Alida’s senior vice-president of people and culture. In Canada, the average age women gave birth started to edge up in the mid-1970s, according to Statistics Canada; in 2011, it surpassed 30 years old. Alida wanted to make starting a family accessible to workers choosing to delay parenthood, said Khara.

When Silicon Valley first popularized egg freezing as a workplace benefit, it led to backlash. Critics argued it wasn’t actually a family-friendly policy but just another way to keep employees tied to work. The Canadian employers said it’s not about forcing women into a particular choice, but offering a range of options so they can decide what is right for them and when. “We’re not here to determine whether it’s the right time for somebody or what process that they want to go through,” said Dhillon. “We just want to understand: what [are] the best benefits we can put in place that gives flexibility of choice for the individual?” At Thinkific, Nagy said the company didn’t focus on providing benefits that only delay parenthood, but opted for broader fertility coverage. “We want to just really support and facilitate whatever those decisions may be.”

While it may be unusual today for an employer to pay for egg freezing, at least some of the companies offering such benefits believe the trend is here to stay. “I think it’s something that’ll become pretty standard,” said Dhillon. “It just takes time for us to get there.” He compared it to more employers offering employee-assistance programs or other mental-health benefits today than five years ago. “It’s something that starts as a trend … and then it becomes table stakes.”