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

power of the pill 759
measures of career and marital status outcomes for single year of birth
cohorts of college women to their access to the pill and abortion when
young.
The unit of observation in our empirical analysis is an age/year cell
(or, equivalently, a year of birth/calendar year cell). We examine 20 age
groups (ages 30–49) across the three census years (1970, 1980, and
1990), yielding 60 observations (derived from 133,126 micro observations
in the three censuses) and covering the 1921–60 birth cohorts of
U.S.-born college graduate women.
Our basic estimating equation has the form
Y p a d X b P g A p e ,
at a t at at at at
where a indexes age and t census year; the dependent variable Y at measures
the share of age group a (or, equivalently, of year of birth cohort
y, where a y p t) experiencing a particular career or marital status
outcome in year t; X at contains controls for race; P at is a measure of
access to or usage of birth control for cohort members as young women;
A at is a measure of access to or usage of abortion for cohort members
as young women; the a a are a full set of age dummies; and the d t are a
full set of census year dummies.
The basic idea behind the specification is to observe successive cohorts
at the same age to examine whether between-cohort changes in career
and marital status outcomes are related to between-cohort changes in
access to the pill and abortion for young single women, controlling for
preexisting trends in these outcomes across cohorts. The specification
is equivalent to controlling for a set of unrestricted single year of age
(life cycle) effects, a preexisting linear time trend in outcomes across
birth cohorts, and a discrete aggregate jump (time effect) for 1990.
We relate the career and marital status outcomes of a birth cohort
to their actual pill usage (proxied by the fraction of college women in
a cohort taking the pill before age 21 among those with no births before
age 23, as in fig. 1) and their pill access (proxied by the fraction in a
cohort born in a state with a nonrestrictive birth control access law when
they were younger than 21 years). We include similar controls for the
abortion rate (for all women rather than college women) when each
cohort was in college (aged 18–21 years) and the abortion legalization
environment they faced at college entrance (at age 18).
Columns 1 and 2 of table 5 examine how pill and abortion access
affected the fraction of college women employed in professional occupations
(excluding nursing and noncollege teaching). The estimates
in column 1 show that the pill usage and abortion rate measures have
similar strong positive effects on the share of college women employed