What is Martha McClintock’s effect?The phenomenon of women's synchronized periods has been popularly referred to as the McClintock effect after Martha K. McClintock, the researcher who published an article called “Menstrual Synchrony and Suppression” in Nature magazine in 1971. The study concluded that women living together or who work closely together synchronize their .McClintock commented that human females experienced the same phenomenon in dormitory life. The scientists challenged her to address the issue scientifically. McClintock took on the topic as her senior thesis at Wellesley and published her results while pursuing a Harvard graduate degree.While McClintock's papers didn't prove a causal basis for the pheromones attributed with the effect, it did offer intriguing evidence. Further research by McClintock and others (Russell et al., 1980; Stern and McClintock, 1998; etc.) pointed to pheromones causing the menstrual synchrony.Interestingly, other studies show that male pheromones affect women’s menstrual cycles.Why do women's periods sync? In a phenomenon also called the dormitory effect, menstrual cycles change for women living together in dormitories, prisons, convents, and other communities. This has been purported to impact the start date and length of menses.The same phenomenon, called the Whitten effect, has been noted in mice and guinea pigs. However, the Whitten effect is caused by male pheromones, whereas the McClintock effect involves only female pheromones.The pheromone chemicals believed responsible are released by skin glands concentrated in the armpit. These airborne chemicals don't give off an odor but are sensed by the nose's vomeronasal organ, or Jacobson’s organ. The theory goes that women release pheromones, and these pheromones signal the hypothalamus in the brain, triggering changes in other women's menstrual cycles and leading to girls and women experiencing menstrual cycles that are closely in sync., Menstrual synchrony, also called the McClintock effect, [1] or the Wellesley effect, [2] is a contested process whereby women who begin living together in close proximity would experience their menstrual cycle onsets (the onset of menstruation or menses) becoming more synchronized together in time than when previously living apart. "For example , What is Martha McClintock’s effect? The phenomenon of women's synchronized periods has been popularly referred to as the McClintock effect after Martha K. McClintock, the researcher who published an article called “Menstrual Synchrony and Suppression” in Nature magazine in 1971..