Women are undervalued and exploited.

While the fight for equality continues, Female empowerment has improved significant, but only relatively recently.

Catalysts for that change might be down to one of the most important health care inventions in the 20th century.

Here's how the pill gave women power over 100 years ago as the women's suffrage movement forced voting rights in the U.

S.

A social activist was fighting for something we might take for granted today.

A woman's control over her own body.

Margaret Sanger, a nurse from New York, was imprisoned for opening a birth control clinic in 1916.

What would then go on to become Planned Parenthood in America?

At a Simon, anti obscenity laws prevented doctors even discussing birth control of their patients.

Early forms of contraception were taboo and relatively ineffective.

A woman could have many more Children than she might want be able to care for or physically survive, Sang his own mother, died at the age of 49 after having 22 pregnancies following decades of campaigning, sang US or a federal ban on birth control lifted.

But she continued, in her quest to find something better well she imagined as a magic pill.

She was introduced to a scientist, Gregory Pincus, who'd had success preventing ovulation and rabbits by testing the hormone progesterone.

With the financial backing of another women's rights campaigner, Katharine McCormick, on a fertility expert called John Rock, Pincus began developing a drug so groundbreaking it would simply become known as the pill.

It's first situation was called end of it, made by G.

D.

Searle company, applied to the FDA for approval and to avoid licensing problems with the pills labeled as being for disturbances of menstruation rather than birth control.

Ninth of May 1960 end of it was made available to married American women.

Within two years, 1.2 million women were using, and it didn't take long for the pill to catch on around the world.

Compared to other forms of contraception pills discreet, easy to use, a much more effective, especially as the choice was now in women's hands, ends.

Since the introduction of the pill, the number of unwanted pregnancies dropped significantly, as did the number of infant and maternal deaths.

An economic revolution was also in the making.

Taking the pill meant women could delay when they had Children dedicate time to an education on a career without fear of accidental pregnancy or having to commit to a life of abstinence.

More women started degrees and enter more male dominated courses like medicine Law Dentistry attended to have longer periods of study barrier to entry.

Previously for women expected to marry and have Children by the early twenties.

By 1972 pill became available to all U.

S citizens on the numbers.

Studying such degrees rose rapidly this internal into higher employment rates and better careers.

The number of women in management and professional occupations also rose dramatically, from 19.9% in 1970 to 51% in 2011.

Pill also affected those who weren't taking it.

There's more Maurin power to focus on careers and delay starting families.

The dynamics of marriage changed with the average age of women time.

They're not starting to get older.

Margaret Sanger's relentless pursuit of improving women's sexual rights also led to unarguable economic benefits for the United States.

It's estimated that every dollar invested in family planning programs, federal and state governments save over $7 because of unintended pregnancies that were prevented, and it's unlocked.

A lot of earning power.

In 1965 26.2 million women were in the U.

S.

Labor force by 2014 Number had risen to 73 million.

Achieving or improving gender equality isn't as simple as just introducing a contraceptive drug.

Despite any more college degrees than men For the last 30 years, women still remain underrepresented every level in corporate America.

Fully closing the gender pay gap could increase total female earnings by $2 trillion across theory CD, so there's a long way to go, plenty more to fight.