The Power of the Pill: Oral Contraceptives and Women’s Career and Marriage Decisions

By Claudia Goldin, Lawrence F. Katz. Journal of Political Economy, 2002

1,469 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The fraction of U.S. college graduate women entering professional programs increased substantially just after 1970, and the age at first marriage among all U.S. college graduate women began to soar around the same year. We explore the relationship between these two changes and the diffusion of the birth control pill (“the pill”) among young, unmarried college graduate women. Although the pill was approved in 1960 by the Food and Drug Administration and spread rapidly among married women, it did not diffuse among young, single women until the late 1960s after state law changes reduced the age of majority and extended “mature minor” decisions. We present both descriptive time series and formal econometric evidence that exploit cross‐state and cross‐cohort variation in pill availability to young, unmarried women, establishing the “power of the pill” in lowering the costs of long‐duration professional education for women and raising the age at first marriage.

Subfields: Demography, Economics and Econometrics, Gender Studies

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Citations in the corpus

Do Male-Female Wage Differentials Reflect Differences in the Return to Skill? Cross-City Evidence from 1980-2000 (2014, positive): “Another view is that PCs are the latest example of ongoing improvements in the quality of capital that favor skilled workers that perhaps go back as much as a century (Goldin and Katz, 2008). (10)This is an alternative explanation for the simultaneous rise in the education wage gap and decline in th”
Women's Education and Family Behavior: Trends in Marriage, Divorce and Fertility (2010, background): “Goldin and Katz (2002) demonstrate that the availability of the birth control pill enabled later marriages and greater labor force participation among college-educated women.”
Changes in hours worked, 1950?2000 (2004, background): “Goldin and Katz (2002) report, for example, that the fraction of females in medical and law schools rose from under 10 percent in the 1960s to close to 50 percent by 2000.”
Gender Role Attitudes and the Labour-market Outcomes of Women across OECD Countries (2005, background): “Trying to link these drops in traditional attitudes with contraceptive technology, following Goldin and Katz (2002), I report the number of children, actual and desired.”
Who Marries Whom and Why (2006, background): “See also Goldin and Katz (2002) and Siow (2002).”
The Impact of Divorce Laws on Marriage (2003, background): “Goldin and Katz (2002) provide a detailed empirical analysis of the introduction of the contraceptive pill, and women’s age at first marriage.”
Divorce Risk, Wages and Working Wives: A Quantitative Life‐Cycle Analysis of Female Labour Force Participation (2014, neutral): “, 2005) or in medical/contraceptive technology (Goldin and Katz, 2002; Albanesi and Olivetti, 2009a, b; Knowles, 2007).”
Women in the Labour Force: How Well is Europe Doing ? (2005, background): “For instance, Goldin and Katz (2002) argue that the introduction and diffusion of the oral contraceptive (the pill) facilitated a woman's investment in human capital by almost eliminating the chance of an accidental pregnancy.”
Cultural Change as Learning: The Evolution of Female Labor Force Participation over a Century (2011, background): “For various explanations for this change see, among others, Goldin (1990), Galor and Weil (1996), Costa (2000), Goldin and Katz (2002), Jones, Manuelli, and McGrattan (2003), Greenwood, Seshadri, and Yorukoglu (2005), Gayle and Golan (2010), Albanesi and Olivetti (2009a, 2009b), Attanasio, Low, and…”
Diverging destinies: How children are faring under the second demographic transition (2004, background): “The pill also encouraged women’s pursuit of professional education (Goldin and Katz 2002).”