Marie Bergström et Mathieu Trachman

In France as elsewhere, it was not the discipline of demography that pioneered women’s and gender studies. The Institute’s “Demography, Gender and Societies” research unit, created in 1999, did not really set out to pursue feminist research studies, though that line of inquiry had been very strong in France since the 1970s, particular in sociology. Rather the unit was created in response to international political mobilization in the 1990s in favor of gender equality, a movement embodied by the United Nations’ worldwide Conference on Population and Development in Cairo in 1994 and the International Women’s Conference in Beijing in 1995.

Obviously, research on fertility, mortality, conjugality, and other major demography study areas has always distinguished between men’s and women’s experiences. But gender cannot be reduced to those areas. Once again, the point is to analyze relations between men and women as social relations, an operation of differentiating and ranking sex-defined groups. Today, analysis of gender inequalities has been developed and diffused considerably at INED—through surveys on balancing work and family life, for example, or on sexual and reproductive rights, or on aging. 

Analyzing gender as a social relation means first of all moving beyond analyses of differences between men and women in which sex is considered a mere variable. The point is to determine how those differences are related to a normative, social and economic system of sex differentiation. And we need to be attentive also to the processes underlying that system. 

Furthermore, INED gender studies are empirical, and often based on data from major, wide-ranging statistical surveys. Today there are several ways of investigating gender, and all of them are important. Cultural studies, for example, reveal how our ideas of love, masculinity, sexuality depend in part on images and accounts circulated in social space by films and TV or network series. Meanwhile, feminist philosophy works toward conceptual clarification of key gender studies notions such as consent. Producing numerical data as we do at INED makes it possible to objectify practices and norms and to measure inequalities with precision: inequalities in domestic task sharing, for example, or intimate partner violence, sexual violence. Our studies apprehend inequalities or differentiated exposure that are still underestimated, or whose very existence may even be denied in some cases. Conducting analyses at the level of the general population also enables researchers to move beyond a particular fraction of society or social space to grasp contrasts and rifts in society as a whole. 

Statistical surveys, especially those reiterated over time, also enable us to measure changes and trends. In the area of sexuality, for example—a bastion of gender inequality—in the last several years we’ve been seeing men’s and women’s experiences drawing closer together in objectifiable ways in such matters as age at first sexual relation and number of sexual partners; also when it comes to sexist and sexual violence, as respondent reporting of those incidents on questionnaires has sharply increased in recent years. 

There are many, both empirical and theoretical—to which we need to add a current political context characterized by reluctance and in some cases hostility toward research approaches based on gender.

First—notably among young people—there’s a critique of gender binarity, understood as a naturalizing opposition between feminine and masculine. “Non-binary” people do not recognize themselves as either men or women and they may lay claim to a kind of gender fluidity. Another example is people who transition to another gender. Population studies today are increasingly attentive to these minority identifications and trajectories, and surveys are being adapted in order to apprehend them effectively. An example is INED’s 2023 ENVIE survey on the sexual and affective trajectories of young people aged 18-29 in France, the first national survey to measure the proportion of non-binary people in the country’s young adult population and to study the specificities of their trajectories and experiences. At a more general level, we’re now finding and examining gender differentiations within women and men as groups: a person can be a little feminine or very masculine regardless of whether they were born female or male. If we want to analyze these variations within sex groups effectively, we need new surveys and new research tools. 

Another major overall question—one that feminist studies have been asking for a long time—is the ways gender is implicated in other social memberships, intersectionality. Gender cannot be analyzed in isolation. Surveys on intimate partner and sexual violence clearly show that women are the main victims, but also that age plays a decisive role. Intersectional approaches often emphasize ethno-racial or class identities or membership, but other types of “membership” are also determinant: age in and of itself constitutes a social relation, as does religion. 

References: 

Marie Bergström, Florence Maillochon, and the ENVIE survey team, 2024, Couples, one-night stands, sexfriends: the varied intimate lives of the under-30s, Population & Societies 623 (June 2024)

Wilfried Rault and Mathieu Trachman (eds.), 2023, Minorités de genre et de sexualité. Objectivation, catégorisations et pratiques d’enquête, Méthodes et savoirs series 13, 288 pp.

Mathieu Trachman, 2022, Very masculine, not very feminine: social variations of gender, Population & Societies 605 (November 2022)

Marie Bergström (ed.), 2025, La sexualité qui vient. Jeunesses et relations intimes après MeToo [When sexuality arrives: versions of youth and intimate relations after MeToo] (Paris: La Découverte)