14 DAY TRIAL // Career, hard economics, social life and family life make women reach menopause finding they are childless. And what's next: frozen eggs and all the SF crap? Here comes a team of Duke's Fuqua School of Business, made of Professor Ralph Keeney and doctoral student Dinah Vernik, with a sophisticated logical decision model approach on the best time for a woman to conceive a first child.
"This decision is too complex to logically consider all the relevant aspects intuitively in one's head. Yet, for many, it is too important and consequential to simply go with one's feelings." wrote the researchers in their study, published in the current issue of the journal Decision Analysis.
A woman can balance her options based on the variables of the model, comparing the benefits of motherhood against its impediments on career and social life and the age-related dangers of decreasing fertility and high risk of delivering children with genetic anomalies.
The authors compared a 25-year-old doctoral student pursuing an academic career and a 20-year-old college student wanting to follow a professional career. The doctoral student should see how motherhood impairs her possibility of getting tenure at a university, but this is also valid for professional women in the field of medicine, law and careers characterized by having to reach a milestone in a determined time period.
If motherhood affected the work required for getting tenure, it should be delayed for a period after reaching that rank. In case of a woman for whom motherhood is not an impediment in bypassing a specific milestone, the analysis shows they should have the first child at a younger age. The model assesses the degree of anticipated negative career impact at a specific moment of the career.
The case of a 20-year-old college student who says she does not want a child until she is 35 years old, the model shows that a child at a much younger age would be a better long-term solution.
"It may seem surprising to suggest having a child at a younger age, even if the woman places no importance on having a child until a certain age. But the model takes into account the fact that taking a maternity leave has less impact on the future career of a woman who is a student or in the beginning of her professional life. This woman's child will also be older and slightly more independent by the time the woman has reached the critical years of her career," said Vernik.
"We use decision analysis all the time to guide complex business and policy questions and decisions, so why not use the structured approach to improve our understanding for making important personal decisions. A model like this doesn't, and shouldn't, preclude the role of emotion, input from the woman's partner, and other factors in personal decision making. But it does allow a woman to weight different factors according to her values, and then consider those factors in relation to each other in a systematic way." said Keeney.