The Consequences of the Demographic Transition for Women’s Status in Society

Martin Namasaka

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: The demographic transition is perhaps the most important event to occur in human affairs during the last 250 years, since the time of the enlightenment. It started in the countries of north-western Europe, and it has gone on to affect the rest of the world (Dyson 2009). Signified by the sustained decline in mortality and subsequently fertility, it has major implications for women’s status within the family and in the society as women become less tied to concerns of the domestic domain. Consequently, the process of the transition, presents an interesting reduction in gender differentiation (Davis, Van den Oever, 1982) with women’s lives becoming more like those of men, rather than the reverse. This paper discusses the consequences the transition for women’s status in both high and low fertility populations by presenting evidence that women gain from the process, however this by no means the end of the story in improvements to issues such as gender equality.

Keywords: Demographic Transition; Women's Status in Society (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I1 I14 I18 I2 I24 I25 J1 J12 J13 J16 J2 J21 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015-01-15
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dem and nep-hme
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: Track citations by RSS feed

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/61296/1/MPRA_paper_61296.pdf original version (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pra:mprapa:61296

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().