When to tell your boss you are having IVF

Trying to balance your personal life and your professional life is difficult at the best of times and mostly a ‘need-to-know’ approach works well. However, fertility treatment creates emotional and time pressures that will affect your work – so when is a good time to tell your boss you are having IVF? Before you start? As you’re going through the treatment? Or do you cross that bridge when you come to it?

Unfortunately, there are no hard and fast rules about when you should tell your manager about your fertility treatment. Francesca, a former IVF patient, would encourage you to start a form of communication early on about what you are going through following her personal experience of balancing IVF and work.  IVF is time-consuming and mind-consuming, and it can make a big difference to your performance at work. She says “explaining to your manager what you’re going through before you have to take time off, or your productivity declines, is much better than trying retrospectively.”

IVF is a legal grey area, and although a lot of big companies have sections in their codes of practice regarding the protocol when someone is going through fertility treatment, many organisations are unsure of the best way to support their employees. There are no rights for couples in the same way there are for maternity, paternity or adoption rights.

“I think there is a lot more that employers can and should be doing to support women going through IVF – and couples going through IVF, because it affects men too,” Francesca says, thinking of her own difficulties with getting her manager to understand what she was going through.

“It’s not just physical injections, it’s the upset and the stress that goes with it.”

Opening up about IVF treatment

Francesca noticed that once she started opening up about her fertility treatment, she realised that many more people than she thought were going through a similar thing.

During the first two treatments, Francesca says, “I chose not to talk to people about it for all my particular reasons at the time – I was too proud, embarrassed, I felt like a failure. I probably suffered a lot less during my third round where actually I’d opened up about the treatment and people at work started talking to me about it.”

She recalls a time when one of her male colleagues pulled her aside for a chat to ask her help, saying, ‘we’re going through the same and I don’t know how to support my wife.’

After she started talking openly about it she saw a big change in how she felt about the treatment. “It’s small rays of honesty that you give to other people and it’s by being bold enough and brave enough to talk about it that makes other people feel like there in a safe place to talk about it with you.”

If you’re going through fertility treatment and are worried about the implications of it on your work, or how to bring up the subject with your boss then the Bourn Hall Fertility Support Group may be a place to turn. It is an informal group of people who are going through IVF, who might be able to offer advice or share experiences.

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