The Power of the Pill: Oral Contraceptives and Women's ... - Mail

power of the pill 745
timing was related to changes in state laws and a growing notion that
young people could make their own decisions. But how could the diffusion
of the pill have affected professional career investments by young
women?
The diffusion of the pill among young, single women may have altered
career decisions through two routes: direct and indirect. By the direct
effect of the pill, we mean the reduction in the cost of marriage delay.
The pill makes marriage delay and thus career investment cheaper, and
women with greater “career ability” become more attractive marriage
partners. By the indirect effect of the pill, we mean the lowering of the
cost of a career through the marriage market. This effect, in contrast,
operates through a thickening of the marriage market for those who
delay marriage and leads to better matches for career women and some
others. To simplify the discussion, we formally model the direct effect
and give the intuition behind the indirect effect. 31
Consider a cohort of n women and n men, each initially unmarried,
in a two-period context with no discounting. Members of each sex agree
on the ranking of the other in terms of marriage partners. Each man
brings Y i (e.g., income), known to all, to marriage. Each woman brings
N j (e.g., nurturing), known to all, to marriage and can also contribute
a j through a career; a j is treated as a household public good. We make
the simplifying assumption that career investment is not possible if a
woman marries in period 1. Marriage delay reduces utility by l for each
partner. The reduction is assumed to be the same for all men and women
and l p l 0 prior to the introduction of the pill. We interpret l as the
utility lost from abstinence as well as from forgone home production
and term l the “impatience factor” to encompass both. The attributes
Y, N, and a are distributed among the n men and women such that
Y ∼ [Y, Y ], N ∼ [N, N ], and a ∼ [a, a], where Y, N, a 1 0. The distributions
of Y, N, and a are known by all participants, and each individual’s
attributes are perfectly observable.
Consider a match between male i and female j. If they marry in period
1, then the male gets N j and the female gets Y i . If they delay marriage
to period 2 and the woman invests in a career, then the male gets
Nj aj l 0 and the female gets Yi aj l 0. If aj 1 l 0,
then both benefit
from delay and the woman will invest in a career in period 1. If, instead,
a j ! l 0,
they marry in period 1 and the woman has no career. Since
there are no disagreements, we can unambiguously match men and
women on the basis of their value in marriage to the other sex.
Men’s attractiveness to women is completely summarized by Y i .
31
See Bergstrom and Bagnoli (1993) for a related model of decisions to delay marriage
by men and the determinants of marriage age differences by sex. We consider models of
single age cohorts of males and females and thereby abstract from the possible impact of
the pill on sex differences in the age at marriage.