SPEAKER_00: Amazing, fascinating stories of inventions, ideas and innovations. Yes, this is the podcast about the things that have helped to shape our lives. Podcasts from the BBC World Service are supported by advertising.
SPEAKER_01: 50 Things That Made the Modern Economy with Tim Harford
SPEAKER_02: The contraceptive pill had profound social consequences. Everyone agrees with that. In fact, that was the point. At least in the view of Margaret Sanger, the birth control activist who urged scientists to develop it, Sanger wanted to liberate women sexually and socially, to put them on a more equal footing with men. But the pill wasn't just socially revolutionary. It also sparked an economic revolution, perhaps the most significant economic change of the late 20th century. To see why, first consider what the pill offered to women. For a start, it worked, which is more than you can say for many of the alternatives. Over the centuries, lovers have tried all kinds of unappealing tricks to prevent pregnancy. There was crocodile dung in ancient Egypt, Aristotle's recommendation of cedar oil and Casanova's method of using half a lemon as a cervical cap. But even the obvious modern alternative to the pill, the condom, has a failure rate. Because people don't tend to use condoms exactly as they're supposed to, they sometimes rip or slip, with the result that for every hundred sexually active women using condoms for a year, 18 will become pregnant. Not great. The failure rate of the sponge is similar. The diaphragm isn't much better. The failure rate of the pill is just 6%, three times better than condoms. That assumes typical use. Use it perfectly and the failure rate drops to one-twentieth of that. And responsibility for using the pill perfectly was the woman's, not her fumbling partner. The pill gave women control in other ways. Using a condom meant negotiating with a partner. The diaphragm and sponge were messy. But the decision to use the pill was a woman's. And it was private. The pill was neat and it was discreet. No wonder women wanted it. The pill was first approved in the United States in 1960, and it took off almost immediately. In just five years, almost half of married women on birth control were using the pill. But the real revolution would come when unmarried women could use oral contraceptives. That took time. But around 1970, ten years after the pill had been approved, US state after US state was making it easier for young, unmarried women to get the pill. Universities began to open family planning centres, and their female students began to use them. By the mid 1970s, the pill was overwhelmingly the most popular form of contraception for 18 and 19 year old women in the United States. And that was when the economic revolution also began. Starting in America in the 1970s, women flocked to particular kinds of degree – law, medicine, dentistry and MBAs. These degrees had been very masculine until then. In 1970, medical degrees were over 90% male. Law degrees and the MBA were over 95% male. Dentistry degrees were 99% male. But at the beginning of the 1970s, equipped with the pill, women surged into all these courses. This wasn't simply because women were more likely to go to university. Women who'd already decided to be students were opting for these professional courses. The proportion of all female students studying subjects such as medicine and law rose dramatically and, logically enough, the presence of women in the professions rose sharply shortly afterwards. But what did this have to do with the pill? The answer is that by giving women control over their fertility, the pill allowed them to invest in their careers. Before the pill was available, taking five years or more to qualify as a doctor or a lawyer didn't look like a good use of time and money. To reap the benefits of those courses, a woman would need to be able to reliably delay becoming a mother until she was 30 at least. Having a baby would derail her studies or delay her professional progress at a critical time. A sexually active woman who tried to become a doctor, dentist or lawyer was doing the equivalent of building a factory in an earthquake zone. Just one bit of bad luck and the expensive investment would be trashed. Of course, women could simply have abstained from sex if they wanted to study for a professional career, but many of them didn't want to do that. And that decision wasn't just about having fun. It was also about finding a husband. Before the pill, people married young. A woman who decided to abstain from sex while developing her career might try to find a husband at the age of 30, only to discover that all the good men had been taken. The pill changed both those dynamics. It meant that unmarried women could have sex with substantially less risk of an unwanted pregnancy, but it also changed the whole pattern of marriage. Everyone started to marry later. Why hurry? And that meant that even women who didn't use the pill found they didn't have to rush into marriage either. The babies started to arrive later and at a time that women chose for themselves. And that meant that women had time to establish a professional career. Of course, many other things were changing for American women in the 1970s. There was the legalisation of abortion around the same time, laws against sex discrimination, the social movement of feminism, and the fact that young men were being drafted to fight in Vietnam, leaving employers keen to recruit women in their place. But a careful statistical study by the Harvard economists Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz strongly suggests that the pill must have played a major role in allowing women to delay marriage, delay motherhood, and invest in their own careers. When you look at the other factors that were changing, the timing isn't quite right to explain what happened. But when Goldin and Katz tracked the availability of the pill to young women state by state, they showed that as each state opened up access to the technology, the enrolment rate in professional courses soared. And so did women's wages. A few years ago, the economist Amalia Miller used a variety of clever statistical methods to demonstrate that if a woman in her 20s was able to delay motherhood by one year, her lifetime earnings would rise by 10%. That was some measure of the vast advantage to a woman of completing her studies and securing her career before having children. But the young women of the 1970s didn't need to see Amalia Miller's research. They already knew the story. As the pill became available, they signed up for long, professional courses in undreamt of numbers. American women today can look across the Pacific Ocean for a vision of an alternative reality. In Japan, one of the world's most technologically advanced societies, the pill wasn't approved for use until 1999. Japanese women had to wait 39 years longer than American women for the same contraceptive. In contrast, when the erection-boosting drug Viagra was approved in the US, Japan was just a few months behind. Gender inequality in Japan is generally reckoned to be worse than anywhere else in the developed world, with women continuing to struggle for recognition in the workplace. It's impossible to disentangle cause and effect here, but the experience in the US suggests that it's no coincidence. Delay the pill by two generations, and of course, the economic impact on women will be enormous. It's a tiny little pill, but it continues to transform the world economy.
SPEAKER_01: Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz published The Power of the Pill in the Journal of Political Economy in 2002.
