The Demography of Demography: Gender Transformation of a Social Science

Simona Bignami, University of Pennsylvania
Meredith A. Kleykamp, Princeton University
Ann Morning, Princeton University

During the past forty years, demography—like many other social sciences, such as psychology and sociology—has seen an increase in the share of women who are students, faculty and researchers. With this shift in gender composition has come the interest over the consequences of an increasingly feminized discipline. In 1993, a content analysis of PAA’s flagship journal, Demography, revealed that the percent of articles with at least one female author had risen from 14% to 47% between the 1960s and the late 1980s. The same analysis showed that, from the late 1980s to the early 1990s, a substantive shift in the focus of demographic research had taken place, moving from fertility and contraception to family and household demography. It was then suggested that the two trends were related, and that a greater proportion of women pursuing careers in social research had affected the nature of the research itself. More than 10 years after this trend toward a feminization of our field of research was observed, we seek to update and expand previous demographic analyses of our discipline. Our aim is to describe the increased feminization of demography, as well as the changing trends in research subjects within the field. Additionally, we seek to identify a correlation between the feminization of demography, the shift in disciplinary focus, and the time order of these changes. In this paper we use PAA membership data, a content analysis of population studies journals, and interviews with longstanding members of PAA in order to describe the shifting gender composition of the field of demography, document the changing trends in research subjects within the field, and identify correlations between both. We also propose possible explanations for these trends, and indicate potential consequences for the future of the discipline if these trends continue. This analysis alone will not provide definitive answers to our questions, but we aim to begin a dialogue in the discipline about the future of our research field.