We men are rather oblivious when it comes to the pill. As the female population will attest, it is a right pain. Side effects include mood swings, intermenstrual spotting, nausea, and many, many more. And yet, since the first rubber condoms became available in 1855, there has been no other temporary male contraceptive – no alternative to the pill for us chaps.

Today is the tenth World Contraception Day, and while the female pill has now been around for almost 70 years, there remains no male equivalent on pharmacy shelves.

So the question that presents itself is: why? And, by extension, what would the male pill look like, and how close is it?

First off it is unlikely to be a pill. This is because of the difference in how the male hormones are metabolized, explains Professor Allan Pacey, fertility expert at the University of Sheffield. "If you want to disrupt men's hormones and provide contraception that way ,then doing it orally won't work because the male hormone is very quickly metabolized. That's just a quirk of nature. The female hormones aren't in that way."

Instead, a more likely option is an injection of hormones, or an implant that would contain a long-lasting form of the concoction required.