Fifty years after the female birth control pill hit the market, male birth control is finally becoming a reality. While I will admit that it must be harder to control a billion sperm than it is to control a single egg, the real reason this technology has taken so long to arrive can be described by two words – supply and demand.

Male Birth Control (MBC) Demand:

From an economics perspective, in order for a man to be willing to use MBC, the benefits of the pill must exceed the costs. Compared to women, the cost of an unplanned pregnancy for a man is much lower. Biological costs aside, mis-timed pregnancies for women often lead to underinvestment in education and, even for those who have completed their schooling, wage penalties that can seriously affect their lifetime earning potential. While it is true that some men may have similar experiences, the biological reality is that a career disruption for a man who unexpectedly becomes a father is much smaller than it is for a woman.

Because the costs of an accidental pregnancy are so high for women, they are prepared to pay a fairly high price for drugs that help them avoid that issue. The demand curve for MBC is below the female demand curve for exactly that reason – for any level of supply, men are not prepared to pay as much as women are for birth control.

Over time, though, two things have happened that have probably increased the demand for MBC (i.e. shifted the demand curve up closer to the female demand curve).

The first is that men who would rather opt out of the family plan all together, despite having impregnated their partners, are having a harder time doing so without paying child support. As governments become better at collecting child support from fathers, and as support levels increase, there is a greater financial penalty for men who don’t protect themselves against accidental pregnancy. So the demand curve for MBC, especially with single men, should have shifted up as a result of this change in policy – those men are willing to pay more than they were in the past.

The second factor that has changed demand over time is that as the wage gap between men and women has fallen, families are choosing to have fewer children in order to allow women to spend more time in the workforce; household demand for birth control has increased significantly. If a higher contribution to household income leads to more bargaining power for women, then women are in a better position to negotiate not having to take contraceptives themselves, especially if they feel that the side effects of the pill (such as reduced libido and weight gain) are greater for them then their partner.

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