Perspectives on Sex, Gender and Population

Did you know that worldwide, women tend to live longer than men, but spend more years in ill health? Or that women do more unpaid work in the home, while they earn less money in the labor market than men, even for equal work? Or that highly educated women are more likely to migrate to a different country for work than highly educated men? This course will examine sex and gender differences in population processes (health & mortality, family & fertility, household & the labor market, migration), and critically investigate where these gender inequalities come from, why they are so persistent, and what could be done about them. We will engage in transdisciplinary perspective taking and address these population issues from different social science angles. While an empirical dichotomisation of “sex” into male and female is often central to population research, what do demographers mean when they talk about sex difference? How do their concepts of sex and gender, and approaches to understanding and explaining gender inequalities, overlap with those from other disciplines? How do they deal with non-binary gender identities? What are other disciplines’ perspective on these gendered issues, and how does research from different fields on these issues speak to each other? We will explore answers to these questions and develop a ‘gendered’ understanding of a variety of issues in population studies, examining them through the lenses of theories and perspectives from demography, sociology, gender studies, and economics.