From yesterday’s New York Times: New research — well, not that new — shows that as men age beyond about 30, their chance of fathering a child with an autism-spectrum disorder or schizophrenia increases, just as their overall fertility decreases. According to NYU psychiatry researcher Dr. Dolores Malaspina: “It turns out the optimal age for being a mother is the same as the optimal age for being a father.”

As the Times’s Lisa Belkin writes: “The push and pull between timetables and dreams, between our bodies and our babies, is at the core of many women’s worldview, which also means it is at the core of relationships between the sexes. This tension feeds the stereotype of woman as eager to settle down and men as reluctant, and it’s the crux of why we see women as ‘old’ and men as ‘distinguished.'”

Indeed, says Dana Goldstein of The American Prospect. “Imagine a world in which the stereotype of women rushing men to the altar, biological clocks on overdrive, simply disappeared, as men took full 50 percent ownership over the reproductive process. Or in which wealthy 50-year-old divorced men ceased to be such catches for 30-year old women, because of weakened sperm. I wouldn’t want to return to a society in which both men and women are pressured into settling down and having babies at an unduly young age. But I do like the idea of rejiggering our notions about the intersection of gender and aging. It isn’t just women who have a lot to fit into their lives in terms of career, romance, and parenthood. Science is beginning to tell us that men are facing the same pressures.”

This is not to say we want men to have reproductive challenges. But given that science shows that they do, it’d be nice if culture would catch up.