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The real reason women freeze their eggs
- mynewtb 9y agoSave you the click: New research confirms that women are not, as a rule, freezing their eggs for career reasons, but instead because they don’t have a partner. The rest is a weird mix of 'male culture' blaming and anecdotes. Nothing lost by skipping this...
- Tycho 9y agoAnd the reason they don't have a partner is...
- Thriptic 9y agoIs probably more complicated than guys suck because they're unwilling to be serious or commit and women are perfect. People are feeling less stable financially and career wise. Dating is also far more complicated than it used to be and people have unrealistic expectations. This inevitably leads to prolonged dating, delayed marriage, and delayed childbirth. Freezing eggs is a pretty natural hedge against this problem.
- matt_wulfeck 9y ago> New research confirms that women are not, as a rule, freezing their eggs for career reasons, but instead because they don’t have a partner. I have a feeling it's more linked than we want to admit. As men we've taken advances in productivity and technology and thrown it in the trash by working longer and harder. More free time is filled up increasingly by more work. Finding a partner and staying together takes a lot of time. Now women are being pulled into the same trap/punishment as men, and finally we can include them in our own destruction. Even in ancient times when invaders razed a city they would kill any fighting-age men but often spare women. In Silicon Valley nobody is spared.
- hydrogen18 9y agoI don't know if you have read it, but this is basically the hypothesis of Germaine Greer. Her conclusion is that equality for women (and thus feminism) does not mean lives for women that are equivalent to that of men.
- tomjen3 9y agoAs can be seen from the following graph, the average person in the US is working a lot fewer hours than they have previously: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/AVHWPEUSA065NRUG https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/AVHWPEUSA065NRUG So not only is free time not taken up by more work, more work is taken up by free time (this also does not include benefits from eg. washing machines). This also agrees with my own experience, my granddad used to get saturday of at noon (ie. it was half a work day), now I get saturday of entirely.
- chongli 9y agoWhen women entered the workforce, became successful, and married working men they set the real estate market on fire. The "American dream" 2 kids, 2 cars, and a white picket fence went from single income, blue-collar affordable to dual income, white-collar struggling to make the down payment. It's not all the fault of feminists, though. Automation, immigration, and the rise of China have all played a big part.
- fastball 9y agoI was with you until you suddenly got racist for no reason. Why does economics immediately become a zero-sum game when immigrants are involved? What does China have to do with America's changing culture?
- autokad 9y ago"Come 35, it’s common for women to knock a year or two off their age on dating apps, having seen interest plummet as men assume they’ll be wanting kids within the year. .... but these are women who want to wait for a partner, someone who will go all in and plan for a future." its hard to make any meaningful comments without actual data, but it feels many of these people have become picky yet want Mr perfect, when they are far from perfect.
- urahara 9y agoMore often it is just about trying to find someone who is at least not 'worse' than she is. There are multiple stats and evidence on how women are discriminated by society in many ways, so it's pretty obvious that their 'dating market' is times more narrow as these attitudes also take place on personal level.
- spodek 9y ago> these are women who want to wait for a partner, someone who will go all in and plan for a future. Men who just wait will end up waiting for a long time, maybe forever, too. Equality also means responsibility. Today, finding a partner means taking initiative, not just waiting, for both sexes.
- urahara 9y agoSure, but women still get punished for initiative due to long standing cultural norms. For women from countries with strongly conservative cultures it can be times harder to not only find a suitable potential partner, but also establish a contact with him without scaring him away with initiative.
- guskel 9y agoWelcome to the dating world for men.
- fastball 9y agoI've had a lot of gal friends of mine talk about guys, and have literally heard the phrase "I would probably date him, but he's too forward". Ugh.
- urahara 9y agoThese 2 worlds are very different. If you meant that men are also punished for initiative in some similar way - no, general social/cultural contexts and punishments on the dating market are completely different for men and women.
- khedoros1 9y agoI strongly prefer women who take the initiative, because there've been too many times that I misinterpreted some signal as being indicative of interest. I decided that the friendships were more important than the possibility of a romantic relationship, so I stopped asking for a long time. When the reverse happened, it never meant the end of a friendship. Things just tended to go smoother. I don't know if most men just decide "screw those friendships" and go for the gusto, or what, but that never made sense to me.
- Myrmornis 9y agoThis article seemed spot-on and fairly free of gender bias to me. All the women I know who have frozen their eggs or investigated doing so have done it because they do not currently have a suitable partner. There are obviously various cultural and economic trends behind this, but the article is correct in identifying the idea that it's carreerist women doing it in order to advance their careers as absurd nonsense from the 80s when people were still getting used to gender equality. Unfortunately, from the comments so far, it seems to have brought out the worst in the HN readers. I don't think anyone wants to hear the thoughts on this question of sexually frustrated 25 yr old male Bay Area programmers who don't know any women in their late 30s.
- guskel 9y agoFree from gender bias? "And here you have the men who learned at school to lose interest in a girl if she texts back too quickly." Yeah, no. I think that most men will find it the other way around.
- Myrmornis 9y agoOK fair enough, delete the "free from gender bias" part of my post. But the point is (a) main claim of article is accurate, a lot of people in their late 30s simply have not found a partner with whom to reproduce; nothing to do with careerism, (b) a lot of the criticisms in this thread seem to come from people with some sort of "Men's Rights" stand point.
- sidlls 9y agoWomen seem to have it a bit harder when it comes to everything, including dating. However, one thing I did when I started looking for an actual partner was to jot down what I was looking for (my "standards") and really evaluate how realistic they were given my appearance, social status, education and personality. It has a rough analogy to how employers in tech complain of a "talent deficit" when in reality it's a "talent deficit at the price we're willing to pay": there is a "partner deficit" in some way in the sense of "deficit at the standards we apply." Not to say obstacles and actual deficits don't exist, but I've found that often when concerns about partner suitability come up the standards involved aren't given as much attention as they merit, or that frequently there are standards being applied the person isn't aware of or doesn't want to admit to.
- marcoperaza 9y ago>Women seem to have it a bit harder when it comes to everything, including dating. In what world is this? Younger women are outperforming men in just about every metric, economic and social. They're also legally privileged, in family law and criminal sentencing. And despite all this, they still have half of the men in the country advocating for even more special privileges for women.
- sidlls 9y agoIn the real world where negative cultural stereotypes about body/image issues are more pronounced for them, and where they are at much higher risk of sex abuse in childhood, rape (at just about any age, and especially by their boyfriends and male acquaintances), harassment, and employment discrimination.
- ThrustVectoring 9y agoThe article completely avoided talking about the elephant in the room: Family law. If I sire children in the state of California, BATNA for figuring out how to make our lives work together is "I get the state to take half a million dollars from you in spousal and child support". This is a huge ask for trust. It's something that I will flat out not consider unless I've known someone for at least four years. And guess what? If this is the timeline it takes to build the trust necessary for starting a family, then 22 year old women are two failed relationships away from being single in their thirties. Much like how it is the retail consumer that pays sales tax, it's young women that pay for the increased levels of trust required for starting a family. Men can wait, and are under almost negative time pressure. Like, if I have a long enough time horizon, I'm probably better off working until I'm 50, saving up $3M or so, moving somewhere with sane family law, and then trying to make a family work with a significantly younger woman.
- koolba 9y agoAnd if you do that last part right, you end up with someone that will be more able (because she's younger) to take care of you when you're older as well.
- ThrustVectoring 9y agoIt's a good deal for everyone, save for the 22 year old guys who are now involuntarily single, and frustrated at their inability to successfully date their peers and start a family. No seriously. If this is the future of the family, there will be widespread rioting and civil unrest. Perhaps the only saving grace is that the 22 year old men can pass the time to their 50s by sleeping with the women who age out of the "marry a richer older guy" cohort.
- toomuchtodo 9y agoThere is no longer any benefit to commitment for that cohort; life is pretty good as is (compared to committing to a partner, a home, children, when economic uncertainty is around every corner). http://www.phillymag.com/articles/the-sorry-lives-and-confusing-times-of-today-s-young-men/ http://www.phillymag.com/articles/the-sorry-lives-and-confus... Young men got a bad hand and are playing it the best they can. Are they frustrated? I think it's more being resigned.
- sitkack 9y agoIf I were a sociologist, I'd post these stories to different forums just for the resulting discussion. Twenty-something startup bros, keep chattering, this freak'n gold.
- conductr 9y ago> ... you have the women in their 30s, beautiful, confident, independent and hilarious, spending their flat deposit on a single hope, because there is nobody there at night ... And where did their 20s go? Probably dedicated to their careers
- jylam 9y agoSo ?
- conductr 9y agoI'd seek the root cause of why women are more likely to be unmarried in their 30s if I were to write this article.
- urahara 9y agoFrankly, with current stats of disadvantages women experience in society, it seems a miracle they still marry at all.
- khedoros1 9y agoThat turns around easily: With all the risks that marriage imposes upon men, it seems a miracle that they still marry at all.
- urahara 9y agoNo, it's not. Commercial risks of marriage that men might face are incomparable to risks of physical threat and abuse (even death) women face in society (including family and romantic engagement) on a daily basis (still along with commercial risks like wage gap). This state of affairs is obvious given stats on rape and many other disadvantages of being a woman, like lower payment and many others. Just rape and harassment stats alone are enough to safely state that women face far, far higher risks than men in general. Men do not live in constant fear that they can easily get assaulted all of a sudden in any social setting. It's not men who face several times more chances to be threatened, assaulted and killed at any age and any level of relationships just on the basis of their gender.
- skore 9y agoI think Jordan Peterson had one of the best takes on why successful women struggle to make both a family and a career happen and why so many screech their careers to a halt when they hit 30: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NV2yvI4Id9Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NV2yvI4Id9Q
- avenoir 9y agoI'll spare you the read. Women are freezing their eggs because men "lose interest in a girl if she texts back too quickly" and men "assume they'll [women] be wanting kids within the year" or men are "unable to commit". Men are the problem. Let's not take responsibility for anything here.
- mattgreenrocks 9y agoCurrent cultural assumption is that your twenties are an extended adolescence where dating is to be casual/fun and you figure out what you want to do with your life, but your thirties is where all the adult stuff happens. I don't agree with that at all. If you want to be happily married with a family, you need to start moving toward that in your twenties in order to ensure you have a good chance of it. Fertility is not a given, nor do you know how long it will take to find a worthwhile partner. (I'm ignoring issues of kids vs career that women have to make here, which is a sucky thing indeed.)
- ravenstine 9y ago> It’s not the man’s fault – [...] > [...]the issue that drives the success of the egg freezing industry has never been employer’s attitudes to motherhood, but instead, men’s. Even if it’s something that only strikes us as it becomes a reality, women know there is a time limit on our fertility. But it’s as if men are encouraged to ignore this icky truth, to look away as if from something obscene. I fail to recognize how it's somehow a man's responsibility to recognize a woman's "time limit". It seems like this author is pining for some kind of Patriarchy Lite where men's primary goal in dating is to inseminate a woman for the sake of her eggs, and not so much for his own benefit. Just like nearly every one of these sorts of articles I've read, it fails to take into account the perspectives of men in the "man deficit". I can speculate to almost no end on why women might believe that there's a "man deficit", but I won't because plenty of men perceive a deficit of women, both in terms of archetypes and availability. In summary, the author is sexist and views men as failures for not providing enough sperm for women's eggs, failing to take into account how in any way how such a setup benefits(or fails) men or why men would even agree to get married in the first place. The view that women have of fatherhood that this author is implying is much more twisted than how she thinks men view motherhood. Seriously, I'm supposed to take pity on women in the dating pool because their biological clock is ticking and therefore sacrifice my own desires? Hah. > And here you have the men who learned at school to lose interest in a girl if she texts back too quickly. I've never heard of this. Has anyone else here? Maybe this is specific to the UK? Seems pretty bizarre as I can't imagine boys in school teaching each other not to get together with girls.
- Balgair 9y agoJust a quick reminder folks, marriage is a cornerstone, not a capstone. You build your lives together.
- technofiend 9y agoGarfunkel and Oates cover the dilemma some women find themselves in related to suddenly realizing you have no partner and no prospects https://youtu.be/H-gfxjAaZg0 https://youtu.be/H-gfxjAaZg0