NVIDIA develops artificial intelligence chips and platforms for a variety of industries and markets. Any and all gamers out there as well as people who are serious about the graphics quality of their computers know about NVIDIA. The company’s Israel branch has announced that starting this year it will “fully and without limitation” fund eligible costs for surrogacy proceedings for each of its 2,500 employees regardless of gender, sexual orientation or marital Status. The company has also announced that it will fund any alternative parenting procedure that its employees choose, such as adoption in Israel.
“The right to parenthood is a basic one and we are happy to announce this process especially now, on Pride Month,” said Adv. Gideon Rosenberg, head of the HR department at NVIDIA Israel. “I call on more companies in the Israeli economy to take similar steps. There will be no employee here who wants to be a parent and gives up on the dream for a financial reason.”
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LGBTQ advocates have, of course, expressed their pleasure with the announcement. And so have women business leaders in Israel.
One of those leaders is Keren Leshem, the CEO of OCON Healthcare, an Israeli FemTech startup. “This is an incredibly important step by a global tech leader!” Keren told JBN. “Parenting is a wonderful gift – I’m sure this will add to the loyalty and passion of the employees to deliver and care right back for the organization.”
“I personally put my team’s family health and focus at the top of my agenda,” she added. “It’s lovely to know other corporates do the same and I hope OCON Healthcare can follow in their footsteps in due course.
NVIDIA’s move comes after the July 2018 amendment to Israel’s Surrogacy Act which allows unmarried women, who are unable to conceive due to medical circumstances, to give birth through a surrogate mother. Originally the amendment was supposed to include men from the gay community; however, this section was removed after public protest. Even then, the company announced a grant of NIS 60,000 ($19,000) and an additional month of maternity leave for each employee in a surrogacy procedure, and now it is expanding its support and removing the financial limit on financing the expensive procedure and granting a full refund without a cost ceiling.
NVIDIA currently employs more than 2,500 people in Israel, following the acquisition of Mellanox, and is one of the largest employers in the local high-tech market. NVIDIA employees in Israel are spread in seven development centers: Yokneam, Tel Aviv, Raanana, Jerusalem, Beer Sheva, Kiryat Gat and Tel Hai. NVIDIA’s development center in Israel is one of the company’s largest outside the United States and joins a limited number of countries around the world in which NVIDIA has chosen to establish extensive R&D activities.
About NVIDIA:
The invention of the graphics card (GPU) by NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA) in 1999 sparked the growth of the PC gaming market, redefined modern computer graphics, and the supercomputing and artificial intelligence industries. The company’s groundbreaking work in accelerated computing and artificial intelligence is reshaping many trillion-dollar industries like transportation, healthcare and manufacturing, and driving the growth of many others.
