The Demographic Category as Leaky Gender Boundary: Implications for Women's Reproductive Health
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The project of demography entails both knowledge production and practice. In knowledge production, the focus has been on the statistical study of populations and population change through the processes of fertility, mortality, family formation/dissolution, population aging, migration, and social mobility. Gender and the bodily are clearly integral to the understanding of population change and processes, but deepening feminist conceptualizations of gender have yet to infuse the production of demographic knowledge. As practice, demography informs population policy and the framing of reproductive health issues. The demographic category, variously defined, is situated in, and socially constructed by, the macro-level stance of demography, consistent with development and international agendas, rather than by either women’s agency or the complex sets of power relations and socio-cultural systems that create, or are a consequence of, population structures and changes. Perplexing paradoxes emerge for women’s reproductive health, three of which are examined here: 1) a knowledge production project, the focus of which is women’s bodies in reproduction, adopting categories that skid by women as agents and socio-political actors; 2) a demographic practice that is political in origin (in disseminating ways of life from a culturally and economically dominant part of the world), not incorporating feminist knowledge of power to enhance understanding of reproduction and reproductive health; and 3) in the intersection of knowledge production and practice, not seeing both as active forces in shaping women as reproductive health agents and women as agents shaping demographic change. This paper offers a foundational critique of the demographic category as eclipsing of women’s agency, and proposes that constructive leaks have sprung in the gender boundaries demography has created, leaks that offer openings for enhanced understanding of women’s reproductive health.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.015 | 0.017 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.069 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.017 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.012 |
| Research integrity | 0.008 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".