Infant formula changed what it meant to be a mother, and TV dinners changed what it meant to be a housewife. But the contraceptive pill changed both—and more besides. It had profound social consequences, and indeed that was the point—at least in the view of Margaret Sanger, the birth-control activist who urged scientists to develop it. Sanger wanted to liberate women sexually and socially, to put them on a more equal footing with men.
But the pill wasn’t just socially revolutionary. It also sparked an economic revolution—perhaps the most significant economic change of the late twentieth century.
To see why, first consider what the pill offered to women.
For a start, it worked—which is more than you can say for many of the alternatives. Over the centuries, lovers have tried all kinds of unappealing tricks to prevent pregnancy. There was crocodile dung in ancient Egypt, Aristotle’s recommendation of cedar oil, and Casanova’s method of using half a lemon as a cervical cap.1 But even the obvious modern alternative to the pill, condoms, have a failure rate. Because people don’t tend to use condoms exactly as they’re supposed to—they sometimes rip or slip—with the result that for every one hundred sexually active women using condoms for a year, eighteen will become pregnant. Not an encouraging success rate. The failure rate of the sponge is similar; the diaphragm isn’t much better.2
But the failure rate of the pill is just 6 percent—three times better than condoms. That assumes typical, imperfect use; use it perfectly and the failure rate drops to one-twentieth of that. And responsibility for using the pill perfectly was the woman’s, not her fumbling partner’s.
The pill gave women control in other ways, too. Using a condom meant negotiating with a partner. The diaphragm and sponge were messy. The pill was neat and it was discreet and the decision to use it was private and a woman’s own. No wonder women wanted it. The pill was first approved for use in the United States in 1960, and it took off almost immediately. In just five years, almost half of married women on birth control were using the pill.
But the real revolution would come when unmarried women could use oral contraceptives. That took time. In the United States, by around 1970, ten years after the pill had been approved, state after state was making it easier for young unmarried women to get the pill, most obviously by lowering the legal age at which they could access the product. Universities began to open family-planning centers, and their female students began to use them. By the mid-1970s, the pill was overwhelmingly the most popular form of contraception for eighteen- and nineteen-year-old women in the United States.3
That was when the economic revolution also began. Beginning in America in the 1970s, women started studying for particular kinds of degrees: law, medicine, dentistry, and business. These degrees had been very masculine until then. In 1970, men earned more than 90 percent of the medical degrees awarded that year. Law and business degree classes were more than 95 percent male. Dentistry degree classes were 99 percent male. But at the beginning of the 1970s, equipped with the pill, women surged into all these courses. The proportion of women in these classes increased swiftly, and by 1980 they were often a third of the class. It was a huge change in a brief space of time.
This wasn’t simply because women were more likely to go to college. Women who’d already decided to be students were opting for these professional courses. The proportion of female students studying subjects such as medicine and law rose dramatically, and logically enough, the presence of women in the professions rose sharply soon after.
But what did this have to do with the pill?
The answer is that by giving women control over their fertility, the pill allowed them to invest in their careers. Before the pill was available, taking five years or more to qualify as a doctor or a lawyer did not look like a good use of time and money. To reap the benefits of those courses, a woman would need to be able to reliably delay becoming a mother until she was thirty at least—having a baby would derail her studies or delay her professional progress at a critical time. A sexually active woman who tried to become a doctor, dentist, or lawyer was doing the equivalent of building a factory in an earthquake zone: just one bit of bad luck and the expensive investment would be trashed.
Of course, women could have simply abstained from sex if they wanted to study for a professional career. But many women didn’t want to. And that decision wasn’t just about having fun; it was also about finding a husband. Before the pill, people married young. A woman who decided to abstain from sex while developing her career might try to find a husband at the age of thirty and find that, quite literally, all the good men had been taken.
The pill changed those dynamics. It meant that unmarried women could have sex with substantially less risk of an unwanted pregnancy. But it also changed the whole pattern of marriage. People—particularly people with college educations—started to marry later. Why hurry? Even women who didn’t use the pill found that they didn’t have to rush into marriage, either, because there would still be plenty of single men to marry a little later in life. The babies started to arrive later, and at a time that women chose for themselves. And that meant that women, at least, had time to establish professional careers.
Of course, many other parts of life were changing for American women in the 1970s. There was the legalization of abortion, laws against sex discrimination, and the social movement of feminism. Young men were being drafted to fight in Vietnam, leaving employers keen to recruit women in their place.
But a careful statistical study by the Harvard economists Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz strongly suggests that the pill must have played a major role in allowing women to delay marriage, delay motherhood, and invest in their own careers. When you look at the other factors that were changing, the timing isn’t quite right to explain what happened. But when Goldin and Katz tracked the availability of the pill to young women, state by state, they showed that as each state opened access to the technology, the enrollment rate in professional courses soared—and so did women’s wages.4
A few years ago, the economist Amalia Miller used a variety of clever statistical methods to demonstrate that if a woman in her twenties was able to delay motherhood by one year, her lifetime earnings would rise by 10 percent: that was some measure of the vast advantage to a woman of completing her studies and securing her career before having children.5 But the young women of the 1970s didn’t need to see Amalia Miller’s research; they already knew it was true. As the pill became widely available, they signed up for long professional courses in unheard-of numbers.
American women today can look across the Pacific Ocean for a vision of an alternative reality. In Japan, one of the world’s most technologically advanced societies, the pill wasn’t approved for use until 1999. Japanese women had to wait thirty-nine years longer than American women for the same contraceptive. In contrast, when the erection-boosting drug Viagra was approved in the United States, Japan was just a few months behind.6 Gender inequality in Japan is generally reckoned to be worse than anywhere else in the developed world, with women continuing to struggle for recognition in the workplace.7 It is impossible to disentangle cause and effect there, but the experience in the United States suggests that it is no coincidence: delay the pill by two generations, and the economic impact on women will be enormous. It is a tiny little pill that continues to transform the world economy.