Women playing the waiting game

For women, changing behaviors and biological imperatives are leading to a material imbalance, which tends to be felt once they’re ready to start a family, and can’t. This is at least in part because of some expectations and behaviors that aren’t changing. From relatively conservative, predominantly Muslim Indonesia to nominally liberal America, it’s a widely accepted norm that women marry men with as much, if not more, education than themselves; men who will earn equal or higher salaries, and be the main household breadwinners. This isn’t necessarily right, but it’s deeply ingrained, connected with traditional ideas of masculinity, providing for a family, and protecting it, that are hard to shake. (There’s even a term for it: hypergamy.)

Whether by choice, accident, or a combination of the two, more and more educated and ambitious women are finding themselves unable to find the mate that they want at the time they’re searching. It’s not for lack of trying. The kind of men they are searching for—available to embark on family life, ready to commit, and with similar levels of education and ambition—simply aren’t there in as great numbers as are needed. Journalist Jon Birger—a co-author on Inhorn’s egg-freezing research— noted the disparity among American women in his book Date-onomics. In the US population as a whole, for the time when the egg-freezing research was carried out, there were 7.4 million university-educated American women aged between 30 and 39, but only 6 million university-educated American men. “This is a ratio of 5:4,” the study notes.
Next To wait or not

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