Voices of Significant "Other"

This volume brings together as essays, papers that were presented at a seminar organised by the Gender and Population Committee of the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population (IUSSP) in Lund, Sweden in 1997. It assesses the gains of the Cairo conference on Population and Development – the first UN conference on population which put gender squarely on the international agenda. The editors point out that while the rhetoric on gender and population has been pervasive, little has actually been achieved in terms of conceptualisation and operationalisation of gender concerns in demography, either in research or policy. It is thus a timely framing of issues with regard to women’s empowerment and its relations with demographic processes.

The book is divided into fourteen chapters, and has an appendix which contains an article by Harriet Presser which was first published in 1997 in the Population and Development Review, and which formed the main background reading for the IUSSP seminar. The fourteen chapters are placed into five broad sections – the introduction, theoretical perspectives, women’s empowerment and reproductive health, women’s empowerment and socio-demographic processes and future directions for population policy.