This Is How Your Job Might Affect Your Fertility

It is only natural to assume that women going through fertility treatment spend a lot of time thinking about what will increase their chances of getting pregnant from the treatment, and, indeed, what will lower the chance of this happening. Most of us will be aware that factors like diet, overall health and lifestyle will matter, but did you know that your profession could also have something to say when it comes to determining how successful your IVF treatment is? Through analyzing 1,146 of their users data (age, education level, income, and location), fertility information website FertilityIQ set out to look into this connection, and came up with some interesting finds. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the data suggest that women making more than $100,000 have a higher IVF success rate than those making less than that. But what's more surprising is just how wide that gap is: Women in the higher income group had more than twice the success of those in the lower-income group. Part of this boost could come naturally from the fact that the higher earners did more of the notoriously expensive IVF cycles, which, on average, performed 20% more cycles than women with lower-incomes. Apart from that, though, FertilityIQ founders Jake and Deborah Andersen-Bialis found that their data also showed a strong correlation between professions and IVF success — even when they accounted for income level. After just a couple of hundred responses the husband and wife team started noticing a strong pattern. For instance,  teachers have great success while women in (traditionally male-dominated) fields like finance and STEM have relatively little success. "We repeatedly heard very similar stories," Deborah explained to Refinery29. These tales included women struggling to balance work and making it to their monitoring appointments.  To make matters worse, "these tend to be industries where you’re the only woman in your department," she explains. "It’s tough enough to talk to your boss about maternity leave, let alone taking time off to get pregnant." Did YOU ever struggle to make it to doctors- and treatment appointments due to work? Or were your management and boss understanding of what you were going through? Let us know in the comments or send me an e-mail at: Trine.Jensen@HerFamily.ie