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A team of researchers made up of the group behind the fertility app Clue and a group at Oxford University have tested the popularly held notion that when women live or work in close proximity for a span of time, they find their menstrual cycles begin to sync with one another. But as researchers note in their article on the Clue website, such notions appear to be completely false.
It is a commonly held notion that women who live or work together, or just spend a lot of time together, find their menstrual cycles syncing. There was even a study done in 1971 by Harvard researcher Martha McClintock tracking the menstrual cycles of female colleges students sharing a dorm. But, as the researchers with this new effort note, no other studies have found it to be true, and McClintock's work has been discredited. But sill the myth persists. To perhaps put an end to the debate, the researchers conducted a test trial with women who use the Clue app—1500 women responded to their request for assistance in a trial and out of those, 360 pairs of women were selected for inclusion. Each were in a close relationship with another woman over an extended period of time. Because the app helps women track and share their period information, the data was already available; all that was needed was for the users to share it with the researchers.
The researchers looked back three menstrual cycles for each of the pairs to see if any alignment was occurring and report that 273 of them actually had cycles that diverged—just 79 were seen to converge. They note that women who were living together were no more aligned than the other pairs. This, they insist, is further proof that the entire idea is a myth with no basis in reality.
(Score: 4, Touché) by Azuma Hazuki on Thursday April 20 2017, @04:53AM (14 children)
Only 4 comments so far and they're all "hurr hurr I don't get female anatomy." We're not that damn mysterious, okay? Don't believe what the media says; just read some biology textbooks. And for the record, yeah, the synchronization thing is bullshit. In all the time I've been with either previous or current lovers we never synched up.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 20 2017, @04:59AM (8 children)
There should be a dating app for women with synchronous cycles to date each other.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday April 20 2017, @05:07AM
I can imagine highly targeted advertising for users of that #app.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Azuma Hazuki on Thursday April 20 2017, @05:08AM (6 children)
Oh gods, no, no, no. When my sister and I overlapped back in the day we'd fight like cats in a sack. Dating is dramatic enough without the conjunction of the red tides, and that's keeping in mind mine are luckily very light and usually don't even cramp all that much. Hers, now, I have to wonder if she has undiagnosed PCOS or something...
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 20 2017, @05:54AM (3 children)
So if someone were to invent a method to induce synchronicity in a large enough population, all women could be made to kill each other at once! Now this sounds like a plan worth researching.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 20 2017, @06:13AM (1 child)
Clearly you haven't thought this through.. at all.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Thursday April 20 2017, @05:57PM
Oh, I dunno, maybe he's one of those gay dudes who hates women. I've met a few. It's...baffling.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 21 2017, @01:44PM
If someone would have though about this early enough, your post wouldn't be here to annoy us...
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Thursday April 20 2017, @01:15PM (1 child)
Well, then the same technology could be used to find partners with maximally-out-of-sync cycles.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Thursday April 20 2017, @05:57PM
The main benefit of simultaneous is how that leaves more time for fun.
Max out-of-sync would be perfect for polyamorous lesbians, though. Always someone available to play.
(Score: 2) by Rivenaleem on Thursday April 20 2017, @08:12AM
Are you telling me the Menstrual cycle isn't linked to the phases of the moon!? All those fantasy novels that called it "The Moon Flow" were lying to me! How dare you try to break my illusion that women are delicate mysterious creatures who are inherently linked to each other through the natural cycles of nature.
(Score: 2) by fraxinus-tree on Thursday April 20 2017, @10:17AM (1 child)
Well, I understand female anatomy a lot better than most women do. I also did read a lot of biology textbooks. The synchronization thing is pretty real from my own experience. I know at least two women who did it, creating a minor inconvenience for me for about a year. Even being pretty different beforehand. It just does not happen most of the time. Then again, most women have near-28 day cycle so one can perceive a sync when there is no one just by sampling a short enough period.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 20 2017, @10:40PM
You had me there.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 20 2017, @06:04PM (1 child)
Every presentation about synchronization in complex systems starts with three typical examples:
When I mentioned these to my girlfriend she said that was not true. She was sharing an apartment with other girls for a long time and never saw any syncing in their cycles. I said something like "but this is science!" and we had a long disagreement about that.
Now I know that I've been all wrong! Today I will come home and apologize with some flowers :)
(Score: 2) by driverless on Friday April 21 2017, @04:00AM
The (now debunked) synchronization of menstrual cycles.
It's not debunked now, it's been debunked for quite some time. I've seen it used in statistics texts as examples of how not to do statistics, alongside things like the Hite study on female sexuality and the 1936 election (mis-)prediction. So a better summary would be "the recently widely publicised information that's been known for some time".
I'm just having this slightly disturbing image of how Mythbusters would have handled this issue...