How EY supports employees pursuing parenthood

IVF and other alternative ways people pursue parenthood can be complicated, expensive, and time-consuming. That’s why professional services firm EY expanded its benefits offering to better support the array of avenues to parenthood and support employees’ different needs when starting a family.

“Let’s stop framing what a family is. A family is what our people call their family,” said Wendy Edgar, EY’s Americas HR director.

Parenthood at EY. The process for developing EY’s “Pathways to Parenthood” benefit began in 2016, when Edgar and other execs revisited parental leave benefits. The move expanded paid leave to 16 weeks, and afforded the same leave for all new parents, regardless of how they expanded their family.

The conversation then expanded to consider ways to support EY employees pursuing parenthood via fertility treatments.

“We tried to make it expansive, to cover all scenarios,” Edgar said. “Sometimes, some new scenarios come and we go, ‘We didn’t think of that, but we’re open to it and we’ll expand it.’”

EY’s program assists with the costs for fertility treatments like IVF and egg and sperm freezing, as well as surrogacy, foster care, and adoption. Employees have access to reimbursements for treatments and costs up to $50,000.

The company budgets for the benefit by looking at prior year use and headcount growth. According to Edgar, more than 2,000 families have tapped into the benefit since its debut in 2017.

“If you’re out there saying you’re diverse and you’re inclusive…then you really need to look in the mirror and look [into] your policies…are those supporting that message?” she said.

EY’s Pathways to Parenthood program reflects Edgar’s acknowledgement that employees may have different needs and be at different points in their lives.

The toll of IVF. Jeremy Thompson, a University of Adelaide, Australia, professor of embryology and reproduction, co-founded Fertilis, a tech company automating and standardizing IVF treatments to improve success rates for patients. He said employers offering IVF benefits need to be cognizant of both the steep cost and emotional toll of the treatment.

“IVF is a very expensive process, and really, the success rates haven’t changed in 15–20 years, despite a whole lot of new technology that’s been imported into the IVF laboratory,” he told HR Brew.

Thompson pointed to research suggesting women ages 30 and under still need about three cycles of IVF to get “even below a 70% success rate,” noting that many women who pursue this treatment are older.

Three treatment cycles can cost around $45,000, he said, and warned that because “IVF is conducted in the area of hope rather than certainty,” sometimes even more cycles are offered, however unlikely the success may be.

In 2016, EY initially offered $25,000 to support employees pursuing alternative routes to parenthood like IVF. But it wasn’t enough to fully support employees, Edgar realized.

“It is always an evolution, because you’re always balancing what benefits you can offer [with] what you can afford. So, a starting point with 25[k] was pretty generous at the time,” she said. “Over time, we had more people going through that we knew that their bills were higher, and we were stopping at 25[k], and we could do more for them.”

Edgar asked EY’s US executive leadership team in 2021 to increase the benefit to $50,000, to address the steeper bills.

Thompson also said that the emotional and mental stress employees face during treatment impacts success. You can further support employees by offering additional time off and counseling resources to help mitigate that stress.

Edgar said that at EY, expectant parents are offered internal coaches to help with the transition into parenthood (both at work and at home), and the company uses a vendor for other support offerings.

“If…things are going good at home, you can usually be a lot better at work because you can give that space—mentally, physically—to work,” she said.—AD