Thursday, October 24, 2019, 3:30 pm to 5:00 pm, Gross Hall 270
Sex, Gender and Health Demography - Susan E. Short, Professor, Director - Population Studies and Training Center, Department of Sociology, Brown University
Nearly twenty-five years ago, Susan Watkins asked, “How do women appear on the pages of Demography?...what does Demography indicate about the way we as a scientific community, as authors, reviewers, and readers, understand women?” Her questions were about women, but also about gender, and they led her to conclude, among other things, that “a more general implication is that we should be more attentive to the fit between gender as it is constructed in the pages of Demography and gender as it is constructed in the societies we study.” Over the nearly twenty-five years since then, demography as a field has expanded, and research on women and gender has flourished. In this paper, building on her work, we turn to the topic of health. Specifically, we ask: What does Demography indicate about the way we as a scientific community understand sex and gender in research on health? We conduct a content analysis of ten years of the journal Demography and describe how population scientists engage sex and gender in articles about health. We conclude by considering opportunities for future research. This research is joint with Kristen McNeill at Brown University.