Studies have shown that when a woman expresses anger in the workplace, it’s met with backlash. Men who express anger at work are perceived as higher status. Women who express anger at work are perceived as lower status and less competent and paid lower wages. Notice your natural bias the next time someone at work exhibits anger. If it’s a man, do you notice yourself giving him the benefit of the doubt and attributing it to an external factor such as a situation or by someone’s provocation? Something must have really set him off. If it’s a woman, do you notice yourself blaming her temperament and personality and treating it as a character flaw? She’s unhinged and has rage issues. If you’re a woman, here’s how you can mitigate the negative bias. You have to turn your anger into words. What kind of words can you use? You don’t get to vent. What to say then? This is what was expected. This is what was done or happened instead. This is what needs to happen. Get on it.   Want answers? Send your questions, comments and thoughts about life to [email protected]   Thank you so much for listening to The Lin Life Universe. I hope you’ve been enjoying it. Please leave a review!

Does gender bias and inequality still exist? Let’s look at some US numbers. The female population is about 51%. Women represent 25% of the Senate and 23% of the House of Representatives. Women account for roughly 47% of the total labor force. But get this. Women make up about 5% of CEOs of Fortune 500 companies. So when you hear women earn 77.9 cents for every dollar earned by men that’s saying that the median salary for women is roughly 22 percent lower than the median salary for men. The pay gap once factors such as experience, industry and job level are accounted for is 97.8 cents earned by a woman for every dollar earned by a man. So the real gap is the opportunity gap. Over the course of their career, men move into higher roles than women. By mid-career, men are 70 percent more likely to be in executive roles. By late career, men are 142 percent more likely to be in VP or C-suite roles.   https://www.catalyst.org/research/women-in-the-workforce-global/   https://www.catalyst.org/research/women-in-sp-500-companies/   http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/fact-sheet/the-data-on-women-leaders/   Want answers? Send your questions, comments and thoughts about life to [email protected]   Thank you so much for listening to The Lin Life Universe. I hope you’ve been enjoying it. Please leave a review!

Sleep is when our body and mind rest, more importantly it’s when physical restoration happens inside the body. The body rebuild muscles, cleans plaque from the walls of our veins, removes waste produced in the brain. Your mind processes and responds to the day’s events and emotions. This is the time we make memories. Sleep is critical to your immune system, appetite regulation and metabolism. So if you are trying to manage your waistline, improve your memory, brighten your mood, heal and recover, reduce stress, improve energy, make decisions and boost creativity…literally sleep on it. Women’s brains are wired differently, their connections are optimized for analytical and intuitive thinking. They tend to multi-task which is mentally and emotionally draining and use more of their brains than men. Women need about 20 minutes more sleep than men.   Want answers? Send your questions, comments and thoughts about life to [email protected]   Thank you so much for listening to The Lin Life Universe. I hope you’ve been enjoying it. Please leave a review!

The common theory is that a female is born with all the eggs she'll ever have, about 2 million at birth. That reduces to about 300,000 at age 25. These are actually potential eggs in the form of ovarian follicles. There is a hormone test AMH (Anti-Mullerian Hormone) that costs about $100 to find out how much is in the ovarian reserve bank but that only accounts for quantity not quality. During each menstrual cycle, one egg gets to take center stage to be released from the ovary. Women lose about 1000 follicles each month. Egg quality decreases with age. From 30 to 40, a woman’s chances of getting pregnant drops from 20% to 5%. And from age 35 to 40, the chance of miscarriage goes up from 20% to 40%. Men produce about 1500 sperm cells every second and will produce over 500 billion sperm cells in a lifetime. Sperm quality also decreases with age. It’s the combination of both partner’ ages that determines the likelihood of pregnancy.    Anti-Mullerian Hormone (AMH) is a hormone secreted by the developing egg sacs (follicles).   https://creatavist-g49brf5.atavist.com/egg-freezing-a-misunderstood-process-clone-69yfk   Want answers? Send your questions, comments and thoughts about life to [email protected]   Thank you so much for listening to The Lin Life Universe. I hope you’ve been enjoying it. Please leave a review!

Do you know your reproductive desires? That’s a fancy way of asking do you want to have kids or not? Perhaps you’re still figuring it out and that’s okay. It’s the one thing you can’t really compromise on in your life or in a relationship. You can’t have and raise half a child or hit pause as they grow up. So do you want kids and how many? Are you willing to go to extraordinary measures like fertility treatments, egg or sperm donation, surrogacy? How about adoption? I decided that I could see a really happy life with kids. I could also see a really happy life without kids. Having kids is not required for my joy or an essential part of my identity. I don’t want a child badly enough to be a single parent. And I don’t want to freeze my eggs. That pretty much leaves surrogacy and adoption on the table but that would only be if my partner wanted kids badly enough that we’d be willing to commit our resources to it. Kids don’t get to choose whether they will be born but you get to choose parenthood or not.  Want answers? Send your questions, comments and thoughts about life to [email protected] Thank you so much for listening to The Lin Life Universe. I hope you’ve been enjoying it. Please leave a review!

A couple questions to get comfortable asking before having sex:1. How do you manage your sexual health and protection? 2. When was the last time you got tested for STDs? Now would you be embarrassed to ask this? Don’t be. Why would you be more comfortable sharing bodily fluids and naked body parts with someone than asking a question? And trust me, you don’t want to share your body with anyone who would make you feel awkward about asking. While both men and women in the US are diagnosed with STIs, they are not equally affected. Women are more likely than men to experience long-term health complications from untreated STIs including infertility. A pregnant woman can also pass an STI along to her baby during pregnancy or childbirth. According to the CDC, 1.1 million people in the US are living with HIV, and 1 in 7 of them don’t know it. Even if you are in a monogamous and/or consenting relationship, isn’t it smart and sexy to know what the baseline is. You know what’s not sexy? Getting an STD.   http://www.ashasexualhealth.org/sexual-health/womens-health/women-and-stis/   http://www.ashasexualhealth.org/stdsstis/statistics/   Want answers? Send your questions, comments and thoughts about life to [email protected]   Thank you so much for listening to The Lin Life Universe. I hope you’ve been enjoying it. Please leave a review!

Let’s talk birth control. When I was about 18 I got on the pill. I wasn’t sexually active but I thought it would help me with my acne. I didn’t ever reconsider my birth control options for at least a decade. A couple years ago I decided that I really needed to reexamine everything in my life that was on auto pilot and make sure that it was still the best thing for me. I discovered the IUD which can be inserted in one quick appointment and last from 3-10 years. Mine was covered by insurance. It got a bad rap back in the 80s due to a faulty device on the market but that has long since been re-engineered. There’s also no user error. With the pill, you need to take it at the same time every day. That gets tricky when you are crossing time zones and an international date line. The contraceptive methods with the highest efficacy are implants, IUDS and sterilization. Implants and IUDS are long acting reversible contraceptive (LARC) methods. If you and/or your partner haven’t reconsidered birth control options in awhile perhaps it’s time to take a look.   https://www.who.int/en/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/family-planning-contraception   https://www.guttmacher.org/fact-sheet/contraceptive-use-united-states   https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/why-do-some-doctors-refuse-to-give-women-iuds/2017/10/12/ee1e881e-a3c9-11e7-b14f-f41773cd5a14_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.2ab1e62313f4   Want answers? Send your questions, comments and thoughts about life to [email protected]   Thank you so much for listening to The Lin Life Universe. I hope you’ve been enjoying it. Please leave a review!

As a woman, the blessings and burdens of reproduction matters will fall squarely on your shoulders because you’re the one that can carry babies. This issue will be time sensitive for you. If you want to have your own, there is some scheduling involved. You can’t just do it any time. There is a period in your life that you will have viable eggs. After that, the cost and resources required for you to have a child will increase significantly if you can’t use your own eggs. And the rub is, you may have to make some decisions before you have all the information including who your parenting partner may or may not be. If you’re approaching 35 and still not sure if you want to have your own biological children, consider having your eggs frozen. This is what always made me consider my time as gold. Frankly put, if no one had told you this already, as a woman your time is more important than a man’s.    Want answers? Send your questions, comments and thoughts about life to [email protected]   Thank you so much for listening to The Lin Life Universe. I hope you’ve been enjoying it. Please leave a review!

The ICPD or International Conference on Population and Development in 1994 adopted this vision of reproductive health:   Every sex act should be free of coercion and infection. Every pregnancy should be intended. Every birth should be healthy.   No population in the world has fully attained the state of health described by the ICPD. Do you believe that reproductive autonomy is a basic human right? That everyone in the world should deserve to decide the number and spacing of children they have? At first glance, this discussion affects women more because abortion, pregnancy care, and safe delivery all directly affect a women's health. Sexually transmitted diseases, sexual violence and circumcision are more serious threats to health for women than for men. However, men's views and behavior directly affect prevention of sexual coercion, condom use for prevention of sexually transmitted diseases, adoption of contraceptive methods and healthy communication. So where do we begin? Have you committed to making every sex act free of coercion and infection?    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK233282/pdf/Bookshelf_NBK233282.pdf   Want answers? Send your questions, comments and thoughts about life to [email protected]   Thank you so much for listening to The Lin Life Universe. I hope you’ve been enjoying it. Please leave a review!

I’m proud to talk about menstrual or period health but that wasn’t always the case. My first period meant rummaging through my mom’s things until I found some pads because I was too embarrassed to talk about it. I did not revisit this issue for at least 20 years. I hadn’t re-considered how I was handling my menstrual cycle except that I was annoyed when I was traveling by the number of products I would have to bring because I couldn’t count on being able to find them abroad. I tried washable period panties and reusable pads, still not great for traveling. My research finally led me to the silicone menstrual cup. It’s shaped like a flexible mini-wine glass without the base. It also happened to be the most cost-effective - pays for itself in months; hygienic - sanitize in boiling water once a month; and sustainable - reusable medical grade can last 10 years, compare that to the average US woman who will use more than 11,000 pads and tampons in her lifetime. I’m a fan! Tell your partners, moms, sisters, girl friends about it.   Want answers? Send your questions, comments and thoughts about life to [email protected]   Thank you so much for listening to The Lin Life Universe. I hope you’ve been enjoying it. Please leave a review!