Assisted Reproductive Technology and Women's Choice to Pursue Professional Degrees

Several studies have highlighted the increasing number of women in higher education and graduate school. In particular, the share of women pursuing degrees in law, medicine, and business has surged.  While it is clear that increased opportunities in the labor market play an important role in this trend, we hypothesize that the availability of infertility treatments increases the value of such degrees, because it allows women to delay childbearing in their 20s and 30s while establishing their careers and reaping the financial benefits of obtaining a professional degree. We exploit the state and time level variation in the enactment of insurance mandates to cover infertility treatments in employer sponsored health plans. These insurance mandates dramatically increase access to assisted reproductive technology. We use a difference in differences strategy and data from the Current Population Survey to analyze the impact of these mandates on the probability that women choose to invest in professional degrees or go into professional occupations. Our results indicate that a mandate to cover assisted reproductive technology does increase the probability that a woman chooses to invest in a professional degree. However, there is very little effect of the mandates on women’s probability of being in a professional career, particularly among women working full time. This is likely due to the fact that a woman’s decision to work in a professional occupation is closely tied to her decision to participate in the labor force.