College educated women unwilling to settle are freezing their eggs
"In my clinic I certainly see more older women seeking fertility treatment than in the past," he said.
The research comes amid a sex imbalance at British universities. In the academic year 2015-2016, 56% of UK students were women and 44% men, according to the Higher Education Statistics Agency.
The number of men attending US colleges for every 100 women has dropped from 117 in 1970 to 75 in 2011. According to the US National Center for Education Statistics, there are only three men college graduates for every four women. Forbes magazine attributes the gap to the changing roles for males in society. Traditionally, men were the primary breadwinners while women would stay home and take care of the children. Now, because more women are becoming independent and more men are comfortable with staying home, fewer men see the need to earn a college degree.
Mike Rowe indicates there are 5.6 million jobs that are fairly well paying and do not require a college degree. Many of those jobs are technical in nature or require skilled labor. If those jobs get filled it would increase the imbalance of fewer college educated men.
Economics writer Jon Birger wrote the 2015 book Date-Onomics, which delves into the math behind finding a suitable mate. Jon Birger says the college and post-college hookup culture, the decline in marriage rates among college-educated women, and the dearth of marriage-material men willing to commit, are all byproducts of lopsided gender ratios and a massive undersupply of college-educated men.
Prof Balen warned that freezing eggs can be a painful and costly process.
"Freezing eggs for a future pregnancy is not a decision to be taken lightly," he said.
"The technology in egg freezing has improved a great deal but it is still no guarantee of a baby later in life.
In the majority of cases the women, who were treated at eight IVF clinics in the US and Israel and interviewed between June 2014 to August 2016, said they could not find an educated man who was willing to commit to family life.
UK researchers interviewed 150 women who had frozen eggs, of whom 90% said they could not find a suitable partner. Author Prof Marcia Inhorn said the research challenged perceptions that women put off having a baby so they could prioritize their job.
In 2014, 816 women froze some eggs for in vitro fertilization (IVF) later, up 25% on 2013, according to the latest figures from the Human Fertilization and Embryology Authority (HFEA), which regulates the industry.
Eggs are more fragile than embryos, and less likely to survive the freeze-thaw process. The pregnancy rate for transferring frozen embryos was 21.9% in 2013, and 22.2% in 2014.
By 2018, the Society of Assisted Reproductive Technology (SART) estimates that 76,000 women will freeze their eggs - more than 15 times the rate in 2013.
Over time, the quality of the remaining eggs in a woman declines and become more likely to have genetic abnormalities. About half of a 30-year-old woman's eggs are chromosomally normal but by age 44 this figure drops to 2 percent.
Facebook, Apple and some other companies have said will pay for employees' elective procedures.
