Claudia Goldin and the Power of the Pill

I was thrilled when I read last week that Claudia Goldin had won the Nobel Prize in Economics. I have never met her but you could say I discovered her 20 years ago when her 2003 study with Lawrence Katz entitled “The Power of the Pill: Oral Contraceptives and Women’s Career and Marriage Decisions” was published.

That title—The Power of the Pill—spoke to me. It was an a-ha moment.

For labor economists, the idea was simple (as brilliant ideas are): it was the contraceptive pill that fueled women’s increased entry into the labor force in the United States in the 1970s. But beyond its labor market effect—and looking back to the late 1960s young woman I was when the pill became available—my sense is the pill mattered more broadly: it powered the women’s liberation movement of the early 1970s and all the progress for women that has followed in the last half-century. The pill gave women an option that women of earlier generations (I think of my mother) had not had. For the first time in the modern age, women could choose their own futures without fear of an unplanned pregnancy: whether to delay marriage in order to extend their own schooling; to combine marriage and professional or graduate schooling before embarking on childbearing; to marry and pursue a career before considering whether to have children at all; to return to school after one or more children (as I did—see Episode 7 in my series, “Episodes in the Life of an American, Woman, Development Economist”). In fact, the number of women applying to law, medical, and business schools in the US exploded in the 1970s—in the same period and along the same lines as did the use of the pill.

To put it another way, in the rich world, the pill made women as “liberated” as men have almost always been. (An exception which my brothers might agree helps prove the rule of men’s comparative freedom: the risk of the draft men faced in the US at the height of the Vietnam War, and before that, in the great wars of the 20th century.)

The idea of the pill’s liberating impact on women spoke to me particularly as a development economist. The power of the pill (and of subsequent even safer and more reliable, effective contraception) has been even more important for women in the developing world, not only for their health and wellbeing, but also for their “agency” and empowerment.

Forty years ago, I headed the World Bank’s 1984 World Development Report on population and development. My team agreed then that family planning was not only or mostly about reducing rapid population growth in the developing world (Paul Ehrlich’s well-known book The Population Bomb had heightened that fear in the rich world); it was about women’s and children’s health. We were on the right track, but we didn’t say enough about contraception liberating and empowering women to plan their own futures—education, work, family, whether and when to marry. That the US periodically limits that access by restricting USAID funding to abortion providers is shameful. It is a deprivation of the freedom that contraceptives provide to young women to plan their own lives—a human right.

Claudia Goldin and I were born in the same year (as was Janet Yellen!). I like to think that put us on the same hidden wavelength that links people who come of age when something big (and in this case largely unnoted at the time) is happening in the world. Indeed, is it not likely that in the late 1960s and the early 1970s, when Goldin and Yellen started their PhD studies at the University of Chicago and Yale, respectively, the admissions committees of graduate programs and professional schools, mostly if not entirely made up of men, were more likely to admit women whom they could be confident would finish their studies than they ever had been before? (What is the natural experiment that could be used to assess that hypothesis?!)

Maybe for Claudia Goldin and for Janet Yellen as for me, the pill opened doors that might not have otherwise opened (see how I got into the Yale PhD economics program, starting five years after Yellen had completed her PhD in that same episode of my series I mention above).

Read here about why the pill and the increase in reproductive rights in the 1970s has mattered for me—a critical chapter in my tale of luck and privilege.

Big thanks to Brian Webster.