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Access to contraception provides women broader opportunities to invest in their education and career. This paper is the first to investigate whether access to oral contraception has differential effects on educational attainment according to one’s genetic endowment for education. This is informative of the existence of complementarities in human capital formation. I use the UK Biobank, restricting my attention to 145,502 women, and show that exposure to the pill is associated with more years of education. The positive association of the pill diffusion with years of education is concentrated among women with lower genetic endowment for education. This finding suggests the existence of a compensating mechanism: an environment in which contraception is more widely available was most productive for women with a lower genetic predisposition towards education, reducing inequalities in educational attainment.
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