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When I recently mentioned to a pregnant acquaintance that I was writing a book about egg freezing (and had frozen my own eggs in hopes of preserving my ability to have children well into my 40s), she replied, "You’re so lucky. I wish I had known to freeze my eggs. " She was 40 years old and wanted two children, so she and her husband were planning to start trying to conceive a second child shortly after the birth of their first. "Now everything is a rush," she said. Married at 38, she didn’t think to talk to her obstetrician-gynecologist about fertility before then. If her doctor had brought up the subject, she said, she might have put away some eggs when she was younger. In our fertility-obsessed society, women can’t escape the message that it’s harder to get pregnant after 35. And yet, it’s not a conversation patients are having with the doctors they talk to about their most intimate issues—their OB-GYNs—unless they bring up the topic first. OB-GYNs routinely ask patients during their annual exams about their sexual histories and need for contraception, but often missing from the list is, "Do you plan to have a family" OB-GYNs are divided on whether it’s their responsibility to broach the topic with patients. Those who take an "ask me first" approach understandably don’t want to offend women who don’t want children, or frighten those who do. It doesn’t take much for an informational briefing to spiral into a teary heart-to-heart about dating woes. Do you reassure a distraught 38-year-old that she’s still got time; encourage her to seriously consider having a baby on her own; or freak her out so she settles for a lackluster relationship And considering that fertility figures are averages (while one woman may need fertility treatment at age 36, another can get pregnant naturally at 42), when is the right age to sound the alarm But the biggest impediment to bringing the issue up was that doctors didn’t have many good recommendations for a single woman. she could either use an anonymous donor’s sperm to have a baby today, or she could fertilize her eggs with it and freeze the resulting embryos for future use. Now, a better option is gaining credibility. Egg freezing (a technique that allows women to store their unfertilized eggs to use with a future partner when they are older) has been available in the United States since the early 2000s, but success rates at first were low and doctors have been hesitant to push it. The American Society for Reproductive Medicine said the technique shouldn’t be "offered or marketed as a means to defer reproductive aging", and deemed it "experimental". Last week, the doctors’ society announced that it was removing the experimental label (though it stopped short of endorsing widespread use of egg freezing to put off having children). After reviewing four randomized controlled trials, it found little difference in the effectiveness of using fresh or frozen eggs in in-vitro fertilization, and said that babies conceived from frozen eggs faced no increased risk of birth defects or developmental problems. The procedure isn’t a panacea. It’s terribly expensive—often $15,000—and is not usually covered by insurance. In addition, there’s a worrisome lack of data regarding the success rates of eggs frozen by the women at the end of their baby-making days. The majority of the women in the four studies were under 35, and it warned against giving women who want to delay childbearing "false hope" that their frozen eggs will work when they are ready to get pregnant years later. Although estimates of the number of American women who have frozen their eggs for nonmedical reasons are in the thousands, very few have yet returned to thaw them—there are only a couple of thousand babies born from frozen eggs in the world. Women should be allowed to come to their own conclusions and take their own risks—there’s a fine line between doctors’ "mentioning" and "suggesting" the procedure—but this is an option they should be hearing about from their OB-GYNs. To standardize the message, professional groups like the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists should create pamphlets that doctors can give to patients. OB-GYN residents also can learn suggested scripts that present the information in a nonbiased, non alarmist way. I first learned about egg freezing from a friend who had talked to her OB-GYN about whether she should freeze, given her family’s history of premature menopause. When I asked my doctor about the procedure, she said she had heard that the success rates had recently improved and gave me the name of a respected fertility doctor. As a result, I stashed away several batches of eggs between the ages of 36 and 38—just before the cutoff at which many doctors no longer consider eggs worthwhile to save. I was fortunate, because I knew to ask. We must go one step further and expect OB-GYNs to bring up family planning at every annual visit, so that women have the information they need to choose to take charge of their fertility. Perhaps more women will think about freezing in their early to mid-30s, when their chances of success are greater. Or maybe, after being asked about their plans from their very first visit, more will decide to start families when their eggs are at their prime, and won’t even need to freeze. Which of the following CANNOT be true about fertility according to the passage
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When I recently mentioned to a pregnant acquaintance that I was writing a book about egg freezing (and had frozen my own eggs in hopes of preserving my ability to have children well into my 40s), she replied, "You’re so lucky. I wish I had known to freeze my eggs. " She was 40 years old and wanted two children, so she and her husband were planning to start trying to conceive a second child shortly after the birth of their first. "Now everything is a rush," she said. Married at 38, she didn’t think to talk to her obstetrician-gynecologist about fertility before then. If her doctor had brought up the subject, she said, she might have put away some eggs when she was younger. In our fertility-obsessed society, women can’t escape the message that it’s harder to get pregnant after 35. And yet, it’s not a conversation patients are having with the doctors they talk to about their most intimate issues—their OB-GYNs—unless they bring up the topic first. OB-GYNs routinely ask patients during their annual exams about their sexual histories and need for contraception, but often missing from the list is, "Do you plan to have a family" OB-GYNs are divided on whether it’s their responsibility to broach the topic with patients. Those who take an "ask me first" approach understandably don’t want to offend women who don’t want children, or frighten those who do. It doesn’t take much for an informational briefing to spiral into a teary heart-to-heart about dating woes. Do you reassure a distraught 38-year-old that she’s still got time; encourage her to seriously consider having a baby on her own; or freak her out so she settles for a lackluster relationship And considering that fertility figures are averages (while one woman may need fertility treatment at age 36, another can get pregnant naturally at 42), when is the right age to sound the alarm But the biggest impediment to bringing the issue up was that doctors didn’t have many good recommendations for a single woman. she could either use an anonymous donor’s sperm to have a baby today, or she could fertilize her eggs with it and freeze the resulting embryos for future use. Now, a better option is gaining credibility. Egg freezing (a technique that allows women to store their unfertilized eggs to use with a future partner when they are older) has been available in the United States since the early 2000s, but success rates at first were low and doctors have been hesitant to push it. The American Society for Reproductive Medicine said the technique shouldn’t be "offered or marketed as a means to defer reproductive aging", and deemed it "experimental". Last week, the doctors’ society announced that it was removing the experimental label (though it stopped short of endorsing widespread use of egg freezing to put off having children). After reviewing four randomized controlled trials, it found little difference in the effectiveness of using fresh or frozen eggs in in-vitro fertilization, and said that babies conceived from frozen eggs faced no increased risk of birth defects or developmental problems. The procedure isn’t a panacea. It’s terribly expensive—often $15,000—and is not usually covered by insurance. In addition, there’s a worrisome lack of data regarding the success rates of eggs frozen by the women at the end of their baby-making days. The majority of the women in the four studies were under 35, and it warned against giving women who want to delay childbearing "false hope" that their frozen eggs will work when they are ready to get pregnant years later. Although estimates of the number of American women who have frozen their eggs for nonmedical reasons are in the thousands, very few have yet returned to thaw them—there are only a couple of thousand babies born from frozen eggs in the world. Women should be allowed to come to their own conclusions and take their own risks—there’s a fine line between doctors’ "mentioning" and "suggesting" the procedure—but this is an option they should be hearing about from their OB-GYNs. To standardize the message, professional groups like the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists should create pamphlets that doctors can give to patients. OB-GYN residents also can learn suggested scripts that present the information in a nonbiased, non alarmist way. I first learned about egg freezing from a friend who had talked to her OB-GYN about whether she should freeze, given her family’s history of premature menopause. When I asked my doctor about the procedure, she said she had heard that the success rates had recently improved and gave me the name of a respected fertility doctor. As a result, I stashed away several batches of eggs between the ages of 36 and 38—just before the cutoff at which many doctors no longer consider eggs worthwhile to save. I was fortunate, because I knew to ask. We must go one step further and expect OB-GYNs to bring up family planning at every annual visit, so that women have the information they need to choose to take charge of their fertility. Perhaps more women will think about freezing in their early to mid-30s, when their chances of success are greater. Or maybe, after being asked about their plans from their very first visit, more will decide to start families when their eggs are at their prime, and won’t even need to freeze. The word "broach" in the sentence "OB-GYNs are divided on whether it’s their responsibility to broach the topic with patients" (para. 4) can best be paraphrased by ______.
Despots and tyrants may have changed the course of human evolution by using their power to force hundreds of women to bear their children, says new research. It shows that the switch from hunter-gathering to farming about 8,000 - 9,000 years ago was closely followed by the emergence of emperors and elites who took control of all wealth, including access to young women. Such men set up systems to impregnate hundreds, or even thousands, of women while making sure other men were too poor or oppressed to have families. It means such men may now have hundreds of millions of descendants, a high proportion of whom may carry the genetic traits that drove their ancestors to seek power and oppress their fellow humans. "In evolutionary terms this period of human existence created an enormous selective pressure, with the guys at the top who had the least desirable traits passing on their genes to huge numbers of offspring," said Laura Betzig, an evolutionary anthropologist. She has studied the emergence of the world’s first six great civilisations in Mesopotamia, Egypt, India, China, Mexico and Peru. In each she found that emperors created systems to "harvest" hundreds of the prettiest young women and then systematically impregnate them. Betzig has studied the records left by the six civilisations to work out how many children were born to emperors. "In China they had it down to a science. Yangdi, the 6th-century Sui dynasty emperor, was credited by an official historian with 100,000 women in his palace at Yangzhou alone," she said. "They even had sex handbooks describing how to work out when a woman was fertile. Then they would be taken to the emperor to be impregnated. It was all organised by the state so the emperor could impregnate as many women as possible. And they had rules, like all the women had to be under 30 and all had to be attractive and symmetrical. This was the system in China for more than 2,000 years." Others relied on violence. One genetic study showed that Genghis Khan, the 13th-century Mongol warlord, who was renowned for sleeping with the most beautiful women in every territory he conquered, now has about 16m male descendants. This compares with the 800 people descended from the average man of that era. Betzig also studied primitive societies. She found that the small bands of hunter-gatherers were the most egalitarian, with men and women able to have the number of children they wanted. "This freedom is probably because they were so mobile. If their group got taken over by a big guy who tried to control resources, the others could simply leave and find somewhere else," she said. This system broke down when the world’s first civilisations emerged about 8,000 years ago based on farming. All began on fertile river plains surrounded by mountains or deserts that made it difficult to leave. Such situations were perfect for the emergence of elites and emperors. In a paper published recently, Betzig has catalogued the same trend in each of the great early civilisations. Such systems arose in Britain as well, especially in the feudal era. "Lords then had sexual access to hundreds of dependent serfs ... with up to a fifth of the population ’in service’," Betzig said. She is to publish a book, The Badge of Lost Innocence, exploring why that era has ended. "The European discovery of the Americas changed everything," she said. "Along with the emergence of democracy it offered millions of people the chance to emigrate or get rid of despotic regimes. The literature of that time shows people wanted to have families of their own and for the first time in thousands of years they had that chance. " Which of the following CANNOT be true about the systems created by emperors according to the passage
Today in the United States and the developed world, women are better off than ever before. But the blunt truth is that men still run the world. While women continue to outpace men in educational achievement, we have ceased making real progress at the top of any industry. Women hold around 14% of Fortune 500 executive-officer positions and about 17% of board seats, numbers that have barely budged over the last decade. This means that when it comes to making the decisions that most affect our world, our voices are not heard equally. It is time for us to face the fact that our revolution has stalled. A truly equal world would be one where women ran half of our countries and companies and men ran half of our homes. The laws of economics and many studies of diversity tell us that if we tapped the entire pool of human resources and talent, our performance would improve. Throughout my career, I was told over and over about inequalities in the workplace and how hard it would be to have a career and a family. I rarely, however, heard anything about the ways I was holding myself back. From the moment they are born, boys and girls are treated differently. Women internalize the negative messages we get throughout our lives—the messages that say it’s wrong to be outspoken, aggressive, more powerful than men—and pull back when we should lean in. We must not ignore the real obstacles women face in the professional world, from sexism and discrimination to a lack of flexibility, access to child care and parental leave. But women can dismantle the internal barriers holding us back today. Here is one example of how women can lean in. In 2003, Columbia Business School professor Frank Flynn and New York University professor Cameron Anderson ran an experiment. They started with a Harvard Business School case study about a real-life entrepreneur named Heidi Roizen. It described how Roizen became a successful venture capitalist by using her "outgoing personality ... and vast personal and professional network ... [which] included many of the most powerful business leaders in the technology sector". Half the students in the experiment were assigned to read Heidi’s story. The other half got the same story with just one difference—the name was changed from Heidi to Howard. When students were polled, they rated Heidi and Howard as equally competent. But Howard came across as a more appealing colleague. Heidi was seen as selfish and not "the type of person you would want to hire or work for". This experiment supports what research has already clearly shown, success and likeability are positively correlated for men and negatively correlated for women. When a man is successful, he is liked by both men and women. When a woman is successful, people of both genders like her less. I believe this bias is at the very core of why women are held back. It is also at the very core of why women hold themselves back. When a woman excels at her job, both men and women will comment that she is accomplishing a lot but is "not as well liked by her peers". She is probably also "too aggressive", "not a team player", "a bit political"; she "can’t be trusted" or is "difficult". Those are all things that have been said about me and almost every senior woman I know. The solution is making sure everyone is aware of the penalty women pay for success. Recently at Facebook, a manager received feedback that a woman who reported to him was "too aggressive". Before including this in her review, he decided to dig deeper. He went back to the people who gave the feedback and asked what aggressive actions she had taken. After they answered, he asked point-blank, "If a man had done those same things, would you have considered him too aggressive" They each said no. By showing both men and women how female colleagues are held to different standards, we can start changing attitudes today. What can we do to change people’s attitude towards women in the workforce
Go to the mall these days and it’s hard not to feel as if you’re being messed with, which is why J. C. Penney’s recent not-going-to- take-it-anymore ad rings true. You may have seen it. consumer upon consumer screaming "No!" as coupons flood out of a mailbox, crowds mass before dawn for a Black Friday-esque sale and store windows are stocked with items that are now 62% off. Too bad you bought them at full price, sucker. The ad is staged and exaggerated, but the frustrations are real. To be a shopper—and not walk away screaming—is to come to grips with the reality that unless you are using shopbots and taking on bargain hunting as a full-time job, as some have, you are almost never going to get the lowest price. So when Penney’s newly appointed CEO, Ron Johnson, declared in mid-January that most of the original prices in his store have long been "fake" and inflated, the only surprising thing was that he had the guts to admit it. More surprising. Johnson said he was going to make changes. Instead of facing infinite discounts and promotions—there were 590 different "sales" at Penney alone in 2011—the department store’s shoppers will now see just three price categories. One will represent discounted seasonal items that change monthly. Another is clearance merchandise marked down on the first and third Fridays of each month. But the majority of goods will be offered every day at 40% or 50% less than the prices Penney used to charge. In retail parlance that’s called EDLP, as in "everyday low price". It’s a radical shift for a promotional department store like Penney. The "fair and square" makeover also includes a new logo, store upgrades and in-store boutiques that will feature fewer brands. The big discount chains Walmart and Target have long staked out EDLP, but mostly we live in a promotional, markdown world. And all those Sunday circulars, flash deals and holiday sales events—which seemed more intense than ever last year—have turned shopping into retail combat. According to the management-consulting firm A.T. Kearney, more than 40% of the items we bought last year were on sale. That’s up from 10% in 1990. Penney has been a notorious discounter, with nearly three-quarters of revenue coming from goods sold at 50% or more off list price—whatever that is—and less than 1% from fullprice merchandise. If anyone is equipped to transform Penney, it’s the new CEO. Johnson joined the retailer in November, arriving from Apple, where for the past decade he presided over the computer company’s huge retail success. Apple loves price maintenance and loathes heavy discounting and sales gimmicks. Johnson believes Penney’s customers will appreciate pricing clarity, not to mention sleeping in. "I don’t think customers like having to come to a store between 8 and 10 a.m. on a Sunday in order to get the best price on swimwear," he said. But iPads are not underwear or makeup. "My intuition is that, in the long run, the changes won’t be effective," says Kit Yarrow, consumer psychologist and author of Gen BuY: How Tweens, Teens and Twenty-Somethings Are Revolutionizing Retail. "A discount gives shoppers the incentive to buy today. Without that, there’s no sense of urgency for people to purchase things that, frankly, they probably don’t need." Today’s consumers respond well to transparency, though, and to businesses that admit their mistakes. The success of the Domino’s "We Were Wrong" campaign is Exhibit A. So Penney’s disavowal of marketing games should build customer trust. At least initially, the slashing of all list prices should also boost sales. But what happens when the novelty wears off and nothing seems special about everyday prices By then, Johnson hopes, J. C. Penney will be a place that shoppers love because they like the merchandise and atmosphere, and they won’t fret about doing better elsewhere. What does the author mean by saying "the only surprising thing was that he had the guts to admit it" (para. 2)
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