Hard labour makes labour hard

Hard labour makes labour hard

Every so often, someone reopens the old debate about women in the workplace and whether we can have it all (a family, a successful career, equality at home and in the office) without compromising along the way. And every so often, some piece of research will smugly pronounce we can't – either because professional women still aren't getting paid as much as men, or because we are working so hard we are apparently damaging our chances of having a baby, as a recent study published in the Current Anthropology journal suggests.

According to Professor Elizabeth Cashdan, an anthropologist at the University of Utah, women in their 20s and 30s pursuing high-powered careers are risking their chance to have children by over-working and putting their bodies under undue stress. She claims high stress levels lead to hormonal changes, with over-worked women losing female oestrogen horomones (vital for conception) and gaining androgens, which include male testosterone hormones – it sounds horribly as if women are slowly morphing into men.

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It doesn't end there. According to Cashdan, this hormonal shift affects the female body shape, so the more androgens present in a woman's bloodstream, the less curvaceous and less "child-bearing" her body becomes, which again means it will be harder to conceive. But can this really all be down to the effect of work on your hormones?

Surely working long hours can affect anyone's health (male or female) – the number of people taking time off work for stress-related problems is on the rise after all. The idea that every woman who works hard is doomed to infertility is a dangerous stereotype verging on the ridiculous. Plenty of women who work can still get pregnant (whether or not they choose to go back to work afterwards is a separate topic entirely); equally, plenty of women who do not work find they simply can't conceive.

Cashdan suggests those women who work long hours are curveless androgyns whose bodies simply cannot cope with pregnancy – not wanting to sound rude, but there are lots of "successful" hard working women who aren't skinny-straight-up-and-down, so I'm not entirely sure I know where she's coming from. I'm no scientist or fertility expert, but I'm not convinced the number of hours you work are up there at the top of the list of reasons why a woman might not be able to carry a child.

After all, it could be that lots of high-achieving, late-working women just don't have time to go home and make babies, or maybe they're just slaving away to save up for the £18,000 needed to raise a baby for the first year of its life before they start trying to actually have one.

But according to the Times, Cashdan's study is being taken seriously by infertility experts who agree with her conclusions. Do you? Are you worried that working long hours might impact on your chances of having a baby? Would you change your hours if it would help you start a family?

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