The Opt-In Revolution? Contraception and the Gender Gap in Wages /
Bailey, Martha J.
The Opt-In Revolution? Contraception and the Gender Gap in Wages / Martha J. Bailey, Brad Hershbein, Amalia R. Miller. - Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2012. - 1 online resource: illustrations (black and white); - NBER working paper series no. w17922 . - Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w17922. .
March 2012.
Decades of research on the U.S. gender gap in wages describes its correlates, but little is known about why women changed their career paths in the 1960s and 1970s. This paper explores the role of "the Pill" in altering women's human capital investments and its ultimate implications for life-cycle wages. Using state-by-birth-cohort variation in legal access, we show that younger access to the Pill conferred an 8-percent hourly wage premium by age fifty. Our estimates imply that the Pill can account for 10 percent of the convergence of the gender gap in the 1980s and 30 percent in the 1990s.
System requirements: Adobe [Acrobat] Reader required for PDF files.
Mode of access: World Wide Web.
The Opt-In Revolution? Contraception and the Gender Gap in Wages / Martha J. Bailey, Brad Hershbein, Amalia R. Miller. - Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2012. - 1 online resource: illustrations (black and white); - NBER working paper series no. w17922 . - Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w17922. .
March 2012.
Decades of research on the U.S. gender gap in wages describes its correlates, but little is known about why women changed their career paths in the 1960s and 1970s. This paper explores the role of "the Pill" in altering women's human capital investments and its ultimate implications for life-cycle wages. Using state-by-birth-cohort variation in legal access, we show that younger access to the Pill conferred an 8-percent hourly wage premium by age fifty. Our estimates imply that the Pill can account for 10 percent of the convergence of the gender gap in the 1980s and 30 percent in the 1990s.
System requirements: Adobe [Acrobat] Reader required for PDF files.
Mode of access: World Wide Web.