Increased Women’s Labour Force Participation in Europe: Progress in the Work-Life Balance or Polarization of Behaviours? Olivier Thévenon
This paper analyses trends in women’s labour market situations between 1992 and 2005 using data from the European Labour Force Surveys (EU-LFS). These situations are modelled to capture the effects of the presence of a child or children, the age of the youngest child, the mother’s age at first birth and the presence of a spouse on women’s employment and working hours, and to see how they change over time. The trends observed in some countries challenge the geographical breakdown proposed by the standard typologies of the 1990s.
The rise in female labour force participation rates is partly due to the reduction in family size, but women’s employment has also increased for a given household size. In some countries, this rise seems to be associated with a decision to have children only if their arrival can be reconciled with employment. Indicators reflecting this situation are found in Germany, Spain, the Netherlands and Portugal, where support for reconciling work and family life is limited. A lesser reduction in family size is observed in Belgium, France and the United Kingdom, however, where the context for reconciling employment and children is more favourable.
Thirty Years of Research into Rendu-Osler-Weber Disease in France: historical Demography, Population Genetics and Molecular BiologyGuy Brunet, Gaëtan Lesca, Emmanuelle Génin, Sophie Dupuis-Girod, Alain Bideau, Henri Plauchu
Rendu-Osler-Weber disease, also known as hereditary hemorrhagic telangiectasia (HHT), has been the focus of several interdisciplinary studies over the last thirty years. An initial epidemiological survey conducted in the 1980s revealed that the prevalence of this hereditary genetic disorder in France is much higher than previously thought, and brought to light several geographical clusters of HHT carriers. The subsequent analysis of the family genealogies of carriers in the main cluster and of the demographic history of the region did not confirm the thesis of a unique founder effect at national level, but provided clues for dating the occurrence of a local mutation. Last, thanks to the recent identification of the genes responsible for HHT, the considerable genetic heterogeneity of the disease has been confirmed and a large number of different mutations existing in France have been identified. Nonetheless, many carriers living in the main geographical cluster studied previously share a single mutation associated with a specific haplotype. At the end of this remarkable study, marked by its multi-disciplinary approach and its exceptional duration, the various converging strands confirm the existence of a local founder effect and provide consistent evidence for dating this mutation.
Completing Life Histories with Imputed Exit Dates: A Method for Historical Data from Passive Registration Systems
George Alter, Isabelle Devos, Alison Kvetko
Life histories can often be reconstructed from administrative sources and other documents that report specific events, like birth, death, visiting a physician, applying for insurance, or using a service. In a “passive registration” system individuals are not under continuous surveillance, and subjects are only known to be present when an event occurs. When individuals move out of the registration area without reporting their movements, the censoring times for those life histories are unobserved. This paper describes a new technique for imputing missing exit dates. Our approach uses information from other events (e.g. births, marriages, deaths) affecting the subject and closely related individuals to estimate the distribution of times between last observed events and (unobserved) exits from the registration area. We take into account differences related to age, sex, marital status, and past migration history. The method is tested on data from nineteenth-century Belgium in which exit dates are explicitly reported.
The French Response to the Demographic Works of Alfred Lotka
Jacques Véron
Although Lotka published his founding article on demography in 1907, he was not discovered by French statisticians interested in population questions until 1931. It was Raoul Husson who introduced his work in France, with the publication of a comparative study of population growth in France and abroad. Lotka’s notion of stable population and his method for calculating the intrinsic rate of natural increase are his most commonly cited contributions, primarily in the Journal de la Société de statistique de Paris. Dublin and Lotka’s work on health and mortality, notably in relation to the United States, are also known. The second part of Théorie analytique des associations biologiques, published in French in 1939, rapidly became a reference text for specialists of "demographic analysis". Adolphe Landry helped to popularize Lotka’s work, and Paul Vincent explicitly acknowledged his intellectual debt to the American demographer. Over his lifetime, Lotka developed close relations with French statisticians who appreciated both his scientific intellect and his human qualities.
Social Control and the Intergenerational Transmission of Age at Marriage, Rural Holland 1850-1940
Jan Van Bavel, Jan Kok
This paper focuses on the intergenerational transmission of age at first marriage from mothers to daughters in rural Holland before and during the early stages of the fertility transition. We use a detailed dataset with two generations of marriages stemming from the province of North-Holland in the Netherlands. Multilevel models are used to analyse the effect of first generation family characteristics on second generation daughters’ ages at first marriage. A crucial advantage compared to conventional family reconstitution studies is that we traced daughters wherever they migrated in the Netherlands. The results clearly indicate that age at first marriage was to some extent inherited from mothers to daughters. Yet, the inheritance effect is not common to all social classes and religious denominations. It is present among the working and middle classes but virtually absent among farmers. It is strong among Protestants but weak among Catholics. These findings support suggestions in the recent literature that family inheritance of reproductive behaviour is stronger in societal circumstances with less group pressure and more individual decision-making.
Estimating False Migrations in SpainCarmen Ródenas Calatayud, Monica Martí Sempere
In Spain, apart from statistical sources such as population censuses or surveys, the Estadística de Variaciones Residenciales is also used to study migration among the population residing, legally or illegally, in the country. The advantage of using this source - which is linked to the Municipal Population Registers - is that it provides a constantly updated record of inter-municipal migrations among the whole population, through which individual migratory trajectories can be constructed. Despite recent attempts to improve its quality, however, it may provide a distorted perspective of migration, as there is no guarantee that all its registrations are associated with real migrations.
Through the reconstruction of the "migratory lives" of the resident population, this study covers the extent of the false migration phenomenon in Spain in the period 2003-2005.
