U-M study: Parsing the pill’s impact on women’s wages

ANN ARBOR, Mich.-Although women continue to lag behind men in pay, the gender wage gap has narrowed considerably since the 1960s. Now a new University of Michigan study is the first to quantify the impact of the pill on women's labor market advances. The study shows that roughly one-third of women's wage gains through the 1990s are due to the availability of oral contraceptives. Published online this week by the National Bureau of Economic Research as a working paper, the study was conducted by U-M economist Martha Bailey and colleagues Brad Hershbein at U-M and Amalia Miller at the University of Virginia. "We found that women who had early access to the pill in the 1960s and 1970s earned 8 percent more on average by the 1980s and 1990s than women without early access," said Bailey, an assistant professor of economics in the U-M College of Literature. and the Arts and a research affiliate at the U-M Institute for Social Research. Bailey and colleagues analyzed the careers of approximately 4,300 women, born from 1943 to 1954, using the National Longitudinal Survey of Young Women.