How to Ask Your Employer for Fertility Benefits

While it’s becoming more common for companies to offer fertility benefits to their employees, it remains true that the majority of employers do not offer coverage for treatment. Whether you’re personally interested in having your company provide benefits or just looking to help advocate for these important benefits on behalf of your colleagues, it can be challenging to know the right steps in navigating this discussion. Here are a few things to consider when asking your employer for fertility benefits: 

Speak with Human Resources  

Whether you work for a small company or a large corporation, it’s important to advocate for the programs that you believe will be valuable for you and your colleagues, and there’s power in numbers. Many benefit programs are born from employee requests. This is an excellent way for your HR team to show that they’re listening to you and want their employees to feel heard and valued. It can feel uncomfortable to reach out to ask for such personal benefits, so you can always work with someone in a leadership role who may be more familiar with HR processes and can help more appropriately manage these conversation. This could be your mentor or manager at work, or even just someone else on your team.  

Know the Value + Come Prepared to Share 

You’re not expected to be an expert in fertility benefits when you come to HR (or do so via a colleague), but it is helpful to come prepared to support this benefit. Fortunately, many resources exist already to help support these conversations (big thanks to our friends at Carrot and Progyny for spearheading this work!). It can be helpful to think about the perspective of an HR team as you’re sharing this request. They value retention and loyalty, general employee happiness and satisfaction, etc. When you start to share more of the ripple effect these benefits can offer (maybe with a few sticky facts to help them understand the vast impact on mental health, happiness, etc) this can make your case more impactful. It can also be helpful to simply start by grounding your HR teams in what these benefits really mean, explaining the full scope of benefits across different team members and groups. For example, one team member might see value in fertility preservation through egg freezing whereas others may leverage the IVF benefit to start their family now, etc. Fertility benefits can also extend into surrogacy and adoption, so please consider these benefits as you conduct this conversation through an inclusive lens.  

Build your Coalition  

Whether your HR team is prepared to respond with benefits right away or need more time to consider this, it can be helpful to build your coalition to help support the ask. The more employees coming together to request these benefits, the more likely you are to be heard. Build an inclusive group that captures different perspective to ensure HR understands the full scope of values.