Articles & Summaries in Economics, Political Science, Psychology, & More

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Fig. 4.—First-year female professional students as a percentage of female B.A.’s (panel A) and as a fraction of first-year students (panel B). Source: B.A. degrees: U.S. Department of Education (1998), table 244. First-year medical students: Journal of the American Medical Association (various years 1978–98). First-year law students: American Bar Association web site (http://www.abanet.org/legaled/femstats.html). First professional degrees in dentistry: U.S. Department of Education (1998), table 259. Earned degrees in business: U.S.Department of Education (1997), table 281. Note: Data for first-year dental and business students are derived from first professional degrees lagged four years for dental students and three years for business students. The data, for years of overlap, are similar to those for first-year students from Students Enrolled for Advanced Degrees (U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, various years). The procedure, moreover, produces values similar to those for medicine and law for which the first-year student time series exists.

2) Age at First Marriage, Sex, and Fertility Expectations

a. 50% of those born 1941-1949 married before age 23 (median college grad age is 22 years). After 1949, this fraction dropped. For those born 1957, the fraction married before 23 was 30%.

b. Examining registration cards for Harvard University Law School for entering classes 1962-1975 in light of the tradition of adopting the male’s last name after marriage, the fraction married at the time of law school graduation from 1964-1966 was about the national average, but from 1970-1972 was one-third the national average.

c. Evidence of sexual activeness is consistent with timing of pill availability, with sexual activity for women under 20 years increasing with cohorts born after 1947.

Fig. 5.—Fraction of college graduate women married before various ages. Source: Current

Population Survey, Fertility and Marital History Supplement, 1990 and 1995. Threeyear

centered moving averages are shown.

Fig. 6.—Fraction of never-married women having sex before various ages. Source: All

but the solid markers: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (1985).

Solid markers for birth cohorts of 1952, 1953, and 1954: Zelnik and Kantner (1989). Solid

markers for birth cohorts of 1957 and 1958: Inter-university Consortium for Political and

Social Research (1982). Three-year centered moving averages are shown. Solid markers,

of the same shape as the open markers, give the values for contemporaneous data.

B) Formal Econometric Analyses: Marital Status and Professional Career Outcomes

1) Age at First Marriage and State Law Changes in Pill Access

a. Regression: Married before 23 dummy race state restrictive birth control law at time when obs. was 18 dummy abortion legal when 18 state of birth dummy year of birth dummy

b. To compensate for possible endogeneity of birth control access to state feminist attitudes, controls for state of birth linear time trends are included. However, the states providing minors access to birth control without parental consent were so wide ranging that it’s more likely that idiosyncratic factors affected the passage of such laws instead of the strength of the women’s movement in those states.

c. Regression Results: Column 1 indicates that the adoption of non-restrictive birth control laws for minors was connected to a statistically significant but small (2 percent) decline in the probability that a college graduate woman was married before age 23. Column 2 shows similar effects on probability of marriage before age 23 between birth control and legalization of abortion. Column 3 demonstrates that the observed effect of access to birth control is consistent with (and even slightly augmented upwardly by) controlling for state of birth linear trends; the same, however, is not true for the abortion law variable.

d.

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States with more lenient regulations about regarding minors had greater pill use by young unmarried women. Pill use was 33-35% greater for 15-19 year olds in less restrictive states. 36-40% greater for 17-19.

Table 3

II. Frameworks to Understand the Effect of the Pill on Marriage and Career

1) There are two routes by which pill diffusion among young, single women could have affected career decisions: direct and indirect.

2) Direct Effect: The pill causes a reduction in the cost of marriage delay, and thus increase the value of a career; women with greater career potential become more attractive marriage partners. The pill is an unequivocal benefit to men; on average, it benefits women, but the group of women who would otherwise without the pill have married without a career lose out because they are sometimes matched to worse partners.

3) Indirect effect: The pill lowers the cost of a career through the marriage market. It thickens the marriage market for those who delay marriage and also leads to better matches for career women and some others.

a. An increase in the number of women who delay marriage, which the direct effect explains, has no effect on the decisions of other women.

b. A “social multiplier” effect is feasible: The pill produces a new equilibrium in which marriages are later, careers are more numerous, and matches are better as a result of couples not being pressured to marry too early. One possible theoretical implication is a reduction in the divorce rate.

4) This framework shows how the pill altered women’s career and marriage decisions. Up-front and intensive career investments are difficult for women with children, so the pill effectively removes this difficulty for women who want to engage in sexual relationships. Besides affecting careers, the pill, as an extremely effective contraceptive method, altered the marriage market. No longer was sex required to be packaged with commitment mechanisms, whether it was “going steady” or getting “engaged,” where if pregnancy occurred, the couple would follow up with marriage.

5) Central empirical predictions of this framework are that an increase in pill dissemination should be accompanied by an increase in professional careers for women, age at first marriage, and age at first birth. Predictions about divorce are ambiguous; while the pill should result in better matches, increased career prospects for women outside marriage, decreased division of labor in the home, and the greater likelihood of fewer children could all increase divorce rates.

III. Evidence for the Power of the Pill

A) Time Series: Career Investment, Marriage, Sex, and Fertility Expectations

1) Career Investment

a. Relevant careers to study are those that require extensive up front education, such as law, medicine, dentistry, and business administration.

b. Time-series data on professional schools is in two forms: as a share of women receiving a bachelor’s degree in the same year and as a share of total first-year enrollments in professional schools.

c. The fraction of female BAs entering law and medical schools began a steep climb around 1970. This increase peaked after approximately one decade.

d. In 1960, the fractions of women to all students in medicine, law, dentistry, and business administration were .1, .04, .01, and .03 respectively. In 1980, they were .3, .36, .19, and .28. This resulted in a large increase in women’s presence in those career fields in the following decades. The percentage of female lawyers and judges was 5.1 in 1970, 13.6 in 1980, and 29.7 percent in 2000. For physicians, it was 9.1, 14.1, and 27.9. Similar patterns followed for other professional occupations.

e. In the case of medical students, the change in career decisions of young women in 1970 did not result from a greater fraction of female applicants being admitted, but an actual increase in the number of female applicants.

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A large amount of literature has recently been dedicated to gender roles in the workplace, particularly focusing on discrimination against women in the form of lost employment opportunities or lower wages. Whatever causes this phenomenon must also be responsible, to some degree, for the significant trend of female entrepreneurs creating solo enterprises. While social interactions and prejudices can account for this discrepancy, the very sensitive issue of productivity can also enter the equation. Specifically relevant to our question is not whether women are more or less productive than men, but whether men working with women are more or less productive than men with men or women with women.[1] Read more…