Considerations for a two - sex demography: when, why and should both sexes matter to demography?

Abstract

Demography, so the cynics say, is long on methods but short on ideas. Or is it ? This Ph.D thesis takes up the challenge posed by that negative view. It shows that although cynicism can seriously damage the reputation of conventional demography, its sway does not survive a careful scrutiny of the history of demography ideas, to say nothing about expanding then further. Indeed, demographers do not need to regardithemselves as scholars who are just testing hypotheses produced in other fields, or have no alternative to simply borrowing a two-sex approach from elsewhere. However , one cannot simply assume that the community of demographers need yet another analytical framework, this time called two sex, demography. Some of the specific questions in the thesis include why has the simple fact that population is constituted of two sexes never been enough to develop a demography analysis standing on the complementarity between thw sexes, rather than on the conflation of both sexes into neuter aggregates or the separation of one sex from the other? Why has the so-called two-sex problem tackled for more than half century in mathematical demography never become a central issue in general demography? Can students of population aspire to an adequate theory of fertility determinants without even deciding upon when, why and how should the complementarity between the sexes be taken into consideration? If demographers do not study population from a two-sex perspective how can they advice policy- makers to formulate policies which should inevitably affect both men and women? These and several other questions are concerned with conceptual and methodological fundamentals, rather than technical and administrative issues. In short, the thesis discusses how demographers could set on the search for a coherent and systematic two-sex explanatory demography within demography itself. And in particular, the thesis shows that thinking about demographic phenomena in terms of the complementarity between the sexex atands as perhaps the most persistent challenge to demography in the future.