Companies provide benefits to their employees for several reasons — first and foremost to recruit new workers and retain the ones they have. And it works. Employees who value a particular benefit or combination of benefits — such as help with tuition to get more training or an extra week's vacation — will be more likely to take jobs and continue to work for that employer.

But companies also offer benefits as tax write-offs or as a way to increase the productivity of their employees by enabling them to focus on their jobs. Thus, some benefits make it easier for employees to put in long hours (on-site services such as dry cleaning, health care, meal delivery, etc.).

The latest benefit? "Egg freezing," so young women can postpone motherhood and concentrate on building their careers.

Why are leading high-tech employers, such as Apple and Facebook, making such generous offers for a process that can cost tens of thousands of dollars? We believe this trend reflects the fact that good jobs, high wages and benefits are based on a (male) career mystique. Workers are expected to move up organizational ladders by devoting their time and effort to the firm at the expense of anything else in their lives.

But this model was based on the feminine mystique, that women would find contentment by focusing exclusively on their homes, children and husbands' career success.

The feminine mystique has eroded, but family-care obligations remain problematic. With the rise in dual-career couples, fewer families have help at home, meaning women (especially) juggle work and home life. The corporate challenge seems to be: How can we make women more like men? How can women fit into the male template of work and career paths?

The latest answer is egg freezing. We are not surprised that some women employees would find this benefit attractive, particularly those who strive to have a successful career where success is determined by continuous work histories and putting in long hours. Such a career mystique has real costs for those who deviate from it or even appear as if they might. Thus women (and especially mothers) experience discrimination in hiring, advancement and wages.

Many women have dealt with this "problem" as a private trouble, leaning in to their careers by postponing or not taking on motherhood, or by outsourcing family care to others. Postponing motherhood by freezing one's eggs must seem like a welcome alternative, a continuation of the trend toward delaying childbirth. Freezing eggs appears to be an easy solution to women's (and increasingly men's) concerns about how to incorporate families — an experience that is life-defining for many — into their career plans.

From the firm's perspective, offering the egg-freezing benefit is a win-win. It attracts and retains women who want to have a "successful" career. And it means their women employees will behave more like men — focusing fully and continuously on their jobs.

But egg freezing simply postpones the real need to replace the career mystique. Offering it spares the firm from having to change organizational policies, practices and norms rewarding only one path — the traditional male track of continuous, long-hour commitment to paid work. This is a key 21st-century challenge for governments and employers, but one that is only being addressed around the edges, such as by changing people's life calendars (egg freezing), not by changing the clocks and calendars of work.

Is egg freezing really a solution? First, freezing eggs is not a sure bet. The process is still new (only shedding its "experimental" label two years ago) and success rates are far from ideal (as high as 30 percent among women in their mid-20s, declining with age). Second, when will be the "right" time to unfreeze? When will career demands slow such that a baby seems feasible? At 45? 50? 60? And what are the implications for children of having older mothers?

Freezing one's eggs may temporarily relieve the anxiety some women face about the prospects of never having the family they desire. But we believe it also creates a falsehood that their life goal of a family will be realized. And it shores up a constraining, outdated career template that needs redesigning to open up rather than limit options for both men and women.

Colleen Flaherty Manchester is assistant professor of work and organizations at the Carlson School of Management and Phyllis Moen is professor of sociology, both at the University of Minnesota.