That is a very interesting fact. However, do you think that there is a possliblity that the correlation isn't valid? There is another correlation about increasing consumption of ice cream cause increasing murder rates, but obviously the two have nothing do do with one another, it has more to do with the time when people consume ice cream and the time when people commit the most murders. Just a thought, but how scientifically accurate is this?

more education /= "smarter"

for the first (and hopefully not the last) time, i actually agree with David Thompson wholeheartedly...

peace and blessings

true nuff. not a good title choice.

LOL! I read this study. It only works on preschool and early elementary school boys that basically change them to girls. Also this study also shows that girls given testosterone will make them better at sports, math, depth perception, and gain weight.

This is good news for lesbians every where as the new generations of girls would have male tendencies and desires, while the rebound testosterone in boys will produce hyper-males by preadolesence.

NG,

what makes you think anyone's going to take anything you say seriously after you spill some trite bullshit like that?

come off it. stop hating people you don't know. grow up.

peace out

ps, jess, thanks for taking resposibility for your slip up. you rock.

The saddest part is that NG didn't even read the article: he's clearing assuming that it was about giving the pill to men, not that women's use of the pill has meant men can acchieve more because they don't have to quit school to pay for a baby. Ah, illiterates.

I think that he might have read the article and is trying (badly) to make some satirical point about how our feminized society medicates men into being women and vice versa. Yes, many people think that Ritalin is a "sedative" designed to make boys more like girls, and I've even heard someone (Francis Fukuyama?) argue that Prozac is supposed to make women more like men, I guess by making them feel better about themselves instead of self-loathing like a proper woman.

Antifeminism and antitechnology, two great tastes that taste great together!

Hi,

I'm the author of the paper in question. I wanted to make a few of points. First, I never claimed in the paper anything about "smartness". That's just the Washington Post's characterization of it.

Second, the "correlation is not causation" claim is valid; economists take this sort of thing very seriously. This has been the reason that it's been so hard to actually figure out the social and economic impact of the pill. This is despite the widely-held impression that it revolutionized the lives of women by allowing greater freedom over their reproductive lives.

This research is related to work done by Claudia Goldin & Larry Katz of Harvard looking at the effect of the pill on career-marriage trade-offs and by Martha Bailey of Michigan looking at its effects on labor force participation. If we were to look at actual use of the pill and these socioeconomic, the worry would be reverse-causation. The women who desired a more education and career-oriented life-track would be the ones who are more likely to take the pill.

So to get around this in all three papers we make use of this neat data "trick" in _access_ to prescription contraceptives. During the 60s and 70s there were big state-based changes to the laws restricting medical choices to women under the age of 21. So, we compare the outcomes for women living in states the year after the laws changed to outcomes the year before. The worry is that this is just picking up big national trends in career aspirations due to feminism and/or economic condiions. So we use as a benchmark the change in outcomes for women living in states where the laws _didn't_ change.

I don't know if that is at all intuitive, but I just wanted to lay it out there that we've given quite a bit of thought to pinning down a causal relationship.

Third point: in none of this work do we attempt to dismiss the tranformative role of feminism in helping young women change their aspirations. Instead, we argue that for many women the pill was a means to accomplish this.

Final point: part of my results fit into a well-established body of research showing that better fertility control increased the education opportunities of women. But, interestingly enough, most fertility research is female-centric and the impacts of men on childbearing decisions, and of childbearing on men, are often ignored completely. I think that in some ways this propagates an outmoded construction of social norms. My work is as much about bringing back into the analysis as looking at the effects of the pill on male outcomes per se.

That being said, I think the results are pretty striking. Based on my results, it looks like over 15,000 more women and an equal number of their male partners were able to complete college every year due to the pill.

Regards,
Heinrich Hock