International Handbook on Gender and Demographic Processes

This handbook presents a comprehensive and up-to-date overview of gender in demography, addressing the many different influences of gender that arise from or influence demographic processes. It collects in one volume the key issues and perspectives in this area, whereby demography is broadly defined. The purpose in casting a wide net is to cover the range of work being done within demography, but at the same time to open up our perspectives to neighboring fields to encourage better conversations around these issues.

The chapters in this handbook carefully document definition and measurement issues, and take up parts of the demographic picture and focus on how gender plays a role in outcomes. In other cases, gender often plays a cross-cutting role in social processes; rather than having a single or easily distinguishable role, it often combines with other social institutions and even other statuses and inequalities to affect outcomes. Thus, a key factor in this volume is how gender interacts with race/ethnicity, class, nationality, and sexuality in any demographic setting.

While each section contains chapters that are broad overviews of the current state of knowledge and behavior, the handbook also includes chapters that focus on specific cultures or events in order to examine how gender operates in a particular circumstance.

Nancy E. Riley is a professor of Sociology at Bowdoin College (Maine, USA). She has graduate degrees in sociology, public health, and demography. Her research focuses on population, gender, and families. She has published extensively on issues in critical demography, especially on gender and demography, including Demography in the Age of the Postmodern (Cambridge, 2003). Her empirical work examines issues of families, gender, and population in China; her 2012 book (Springer), Laboring in Paradise: Gender, Work, and Family in a Chinese Economic Zone explored the gendered dynamics of power in migrant families in Northeast China. Her most recent book, Population in China (Polity) was published in 2017. She is currently working on a project on Chinese experience in Hawai`i.

Jan Brunson is an anthropologist (Ph.D. Brown University, trainee of the Population Studies and Training Center) specializing in global discourses on women’s health. Her research intertwines medical anthropology, demography, and cultural studies of science, technology, and medicine. She has conducted ethnographic research in Nepal on women’s health and the politics of reproduction for over a decade. Her research portfolio includes studies of contraceptive technologies and family planning discourses, maternal health in resource-poor and disaster settings, Maoist motherhood, and women’s autonomy and spatial mobility. Brunson served as the Chair of the Council on Anthropology and Reproduction, under the auspices of the Society for Medical Anthropology, from 2015 to 2017. Her first book, Planning Families in Nepal: Global and Local Projects of Reproduction, offers an account of Hindu Nepali women as they face conflicting global and local ideals regarding reproduction and family. Her articles appear in the scholarly journals Social Science and Medicine, Ethnos, Maternal and Child Health Journal, Studies in Family Planning, Practicing Anthropology, and Studies in Nepali History and Society. Brunson is currently an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa.