Population Module
    Lesson 1 - Where in the world is the human population changing?

    Lesson 2 - How is population change linked to economic development?

    Lesson 3 - How does the social status and education of women affect a country's population?
    Lesson 4 - How can countries work together to solve problems related to population and resources?
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Lesson 3 - Page 1 - How does the social status and education of women affect a country's population?

Objectives: By successfully completing this lesson, your team will be able to:

  1. Explain relationships between fertility rates and the rights and opportunities afforded to women.
  2. Discuss measures for promoting gender equity in population policy.

General Tips: Here are a few suggestions that can help your team complete this lesson together:

  • Click the icon to open a new window with instructions for completing the lesson's collaborative learning activities (listed as Step 1, Step 2, and so forth).
  • Your team should use the Group Discussion Board (located in the Communication area) to discuss questions that appear in blue boxes.
  • Important vocabulary terms terms are defined in the Glossary (located in the Documents area).
  • Complete this lesson according to the schedule provided by your instructor. Doing so will ensure that your team learns together.
  • Elect leaders for each local group who can help coordinate the efforts of the entire team.

How is fertility affected by gender relationships?

One of the most important variables in demography is the fertility rate - the average number of children born to women in a particular place or country. Fertility rate is not solely determined by biology; a wide range of cultural and socioeconomic conditions can influence the number of children that a woman will have in her lifetime. These conditions include education, development, participation in the labor force, access to contraception, and infant mortality.

Gender is a term that is used to define the social status of women and men. Geographers are interested in many aspects of gender, particularly how female reproduction is linked to the culture, politics, and sociology of particular places. Understanding gender relationships and how these relationships vary from place to place is helpful for explaining geographical patterns of population growth. The Population Reference Bureau recently summarized some of these patterns:

Generally, the age at which a woman first marries is directly related to the number of children she will bear because it affects the length of time she will be at risk of becoming pregnant. Of course, unmarried women may also have children, but the vast majority of childbearing takes place within marriage throughout most of the world, which makes the age at marriage a valuable indicator of a woman's lifetime fertility. The total fertility rate - or average births per woman - for German women, who marry around age 24, is 1.3. Conversely, women in Chad, who marry earlier, average 7 children (Figure 1). Within countries, rural women tend to marry earlier than urban women and tend to have larger families.

Figure 1. Women's Age at First Marriage (years) and Family Size (TFR) in Selected Countries, 1990s. Source: Demographic and Health Surveys, 1991-1999; and Carl Haub and Diana Cornelius, 2000 World Population Data Sheet (Washington, DC: Population Reference Bureau, 2000).

In this lesson, your team will consider how gender issues are related to geographical patterns of population growth.