8 Things Data Can Tell Us About Sex & Periods
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Schools teach sex in a fear-based way and the last comprehensive study on reproductive health was over 50 years ago. Data collected by the app Glow provides new insights into topics like cycle length, diarrhea during periods, sex and fertility. The data shows that many women incorrectly estimate their cycle length and that peak sex does not always coincide with peak orgasm.
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8 Things Data Can Tell Us About Sex & Periods
- 1. 8 THINGS DATA CAN TELL US ABOUT SEX & PERIODS Jennifer Tye
- 2. What do we know about sex? Last comprehensive study in reproductive health was 50+ years ago Women significantly under- represented in medical and clinical research studies Schools teach a fear-based approach to sex
- 3. How can we learn about sex at the population level?
- 4. Data at Glow
- 5. Findings: Cycle Length 1 out of 3 women 1 out of 2 women are incorrectly estimating their cycle length by 6 days 4 days
- 6. Findings: Diarrhea during period
- 7. Findings: Phases of the moon
- 8. Findings: Month at a Glance
- 9. Findings: peak sex v. peak orgasm
- 11. Findings: birth control & withdrawal
- 12. Findings: sex & fertility internationally
Editor's Notes
- We know about our personal experiences with sex. It’s harder to get information about sex at the population level. This is at least partially due to the fact that sex is taboo in our culture. Because of this taboo, there’s a lack of research and a lack of education about sex. Lack of research Last comprehensive study on fertility was 50 years ago Women under-represented in clinical trials—we’re not getting the full story Lack of education Fear-based approach to sex ed, means that people don’t have access to good information about sex We don’t know as much about sex at the population level as we should.
- Academic research - small scale, unrepresentative. We need a method of collecting this information that is accessible to everyone. That’s where health tracking comes in. People have a vested interest in keeping track of their health using their phone. Recent NYT headline: “People are more honest with their phones than they are with their doctors.” The buzzword for this is the qualified self movement. People pay attention to their health, create their own mobile data about it. Pooled together, the data can tell us what’s happening at a population level. Data allows us to see unprecedented macro trends in various areas of health—including menstrual and sexual health.
- The company I work for, Glow, is trying to help build this data set. Our mission is empowering women with information about their health—starting with reproductive and maternal health. We seek to do that through data. What does that practically mean? We make health tracking apps focused on women’s reproductive health. Free and available in app store and play store Our apps support women from period to parenting People use our apps to track their health day-to-day In this presentation, I’ll be showcasing some of the data we have collected in two of our apps: Glow and Eve by Glow Glow Fertility tracker Users enter information daily about menstrual cycle, diet, exercise, health, weight, sexual activity Eve by Glow Wild younger sister of the Glow app Period & sexual health tracker Users enter data about their cycle, symptoms, sex life, and exercise (similar to the Glow app, but marketed to a younger crowd) Let’s take a look at what we’ve found.
- First finding relates to cycle length. For those who aren’t familiar, a woman’s cycle starts on day 1 of her period. And her cycle length is the # of days until the start of her next period. We’re told in school that average cycle is 28 days long. As such, most women think their cycle is 28 days long. That is not the case. There is a ton of variation in a woman’s cycle length, and lots of women aren’t aware of their own cycle patterns.
- Our cycles actually set the cadence for a lot of our body’s patterns. Take, for example, instances of diarrhea. The scientific community has seen that women are more likely to get diarrhea towards the beginning of their periods. That’s because during menstruation, the female body releases prostaglandins that cause the uterus to contract. Studies have shown that women experiencing diarrhea have higher levels of prostaglandins in their system. Thus, it is believed that excess levels of prostaglandins could be the cause of the diarrhea and gurgly noises experienced during your period. We’ve seen this correlation confirmed in our data set. Our data shows that day 1 of your period is the time when women are most likely to have diarrhea BY FAR. Our data also answers questions that scientists have been wondering about, but haven’t collected enough information to figure out with confidence…
- One question that the scientific community has been asking for decades is: “Do women’s cycles really correlate with lunar phases? At most, past studies that took on this question were on the scale of ~100 women. We were able to look at 38,000 cycles! This is what we found: Fewer women than expected get their periods when the moon is full More women than expected get their periods when the moon is waxing crescent Lunar cycle length (29.9 days) and average menstrual cycle length (29.5 days) line up We presented our analysis at ASRM—using our data to give back to the medical community
- Now that we’re on the topic of cycles, here’s a graphic that shows the emotional and physical variation we’ve observed over the course of a woman’s cycle. Your cycle starts on the fist day of your period Days 12-16 are when our users tend to experience peak friskiness, peak sex, peak happiness. These days also correspond with ovulation for most women. In spite of that, the highest chances of experiencing an orgasm happen towards the end of your cycle, right before your period. Let’s dig into that a little more.
- Peak sex on day 14, peak orgasm on day 30. You’ll see that women are having less sex as they get to the time of the month when they’re more likely to orgasm; and they orgasm the least when they’re having sex the most. If more women knew about this, maybe it would help them achieve more orgasms…
- What else does our data set teach us about sexual intimacy? Looking at the sexual position data collected in our apps, we can see the frequency with which couples use different sexual positions. And we’ve looked at % chance of orgasming by position. You’ll see that women report being “on bottom” most of the time, but that on bottom sex has a lower orgasm rate than on top. @Jen—on this slide I anticipate we could get questions about non heterosexual couples. The female position diagram is taken from heterosexual couples only. Do you know is fate same is true for the female orgasm data?
- Our data set also has some interesting findings about birth control method. Here you see two charts: national birth control method data reported by the CDC, compared to birth control methods of 3 million+ women listed in the Glow data set. There are some major discrepancies between the two! The most notable relates to the withdrawal method (5% CDC vs 18% on Glow) This data leads us to believe that more people are practicing withdrawal than national surveys suggest (reporting bias, etc. taints national surveys). We published an article about this that got picked up by Mic News, Teen Vogue, The Guardian—if withdrawal is happening this much, people should know how to do it safely. Enough about avoiding pregnancy—our data also has interesting things to say about couples who are actively trying to get pregnant.
- Last finding we’re presenting today: We compared the amount of sexual activity and the fertility rates that we saw across our userbase internationally. All of these % are compared to the Glow population average. We saw that Canadians are all over it—45% more sex than average on Glow population, and 21% more fertile! Not bad stats from the land of the maple leaves.
- There’s more where that came from—every day at Glow we’re leveraging our data to make discoveries about sexual and reproductive health. If you like what you saw today, stay in touch for more learnings!