Rush Limbaugh doesn't like oral contraception. At least, he doesn't think health insurers should have to pay it ('Dar He Blogs will keep this debate academic and avoid any "pot-kettle-black" type comments). I'm guessing he wasn't aware of a new study by Martha Bailey and co-authors illustrating the large, positive labor market effects "The Pill" has provided for women:
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 to contraception, 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.
Why would birth control pills enable women to earn more? By allowing more control over the reproductive cycle, this would reduce uncertainty in the timing of certain events, such as pursuing college, job training opportunities, and entering the workforce. One could easily imagine how providing women with relative certainty could lead to more investment in their "human capital" because it is now easier to do so and the returns become more predictable.
Another way oral contraceptives can help in the labor market has to do with absenteeism due to menstruation. In a really neat study, Andrea Ichino and Enrico Moretti show that work absences for young women follow a 28 day cycle, whereas those for women over the age of 45, and men of any age, do not. They suggest that this pattern is due to menstruation and go on to calculate that lost work days on the account of the cycle may explain 14% of the gender differential in earnings seen in their Italian dataset.
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