E. A. Hammel

Sex Bias in Graduate Admissions: Data from Berkeley

Examination of aggregate data on graduate admissions to the University of California, Berkeley, for fall 1973 shows a clear but misleading pattern of bias against female applicants. Examination of the disaggregated data reveals few decision-making units that show statistically significant departures from expected frequencies of female admissions, and about as many units appear to favor women as to favor men. If the data are properly pooled, taking into account the autonomy of departmental decision making, thus correcting for the tendency of women to apply to graduate departments that are more difficult for applicants of either sex to enter, there is a small but statistically significant bias in favor of women. The graduate departments that are easier to enter tend to be those that require more mathematics in the undergraduate preparatory curriculum. The bias in the aggregated data stems not from any pattern of discrimination on the part of admissions committees, which seem quite fair on the whole, but apparently from prior screening at earlier levels of the educational system. Women are shunted by their socialization and education toward fields of graduate study that are generally more crowded, less productive of completed degrees, and less well funded, and that frequently offer poorer professional employment prospects.

Comparing Household Structure Over Time and Between Cultures

Because of the importance of the family and household in all societies and at all historical periods, it is essential to be able to make comparisons between varieties of domestic groups. If we wish to comment on the extent to which the household is affected by social change and especially by the process of modernization, industrialization, social mobilization, or whatever that vague but ubiquitous phenomenon is called, it must be clear what would consitute such change. This means knowing how domestic group structure differs from country to country as well as from period to period.

Fertility Decline in Prussia, 1875–1910: A Pooled Cross-Section Time Series Analysis

Marital fertility level and decline are examined in 407 small areas in Prussia using quinquennial data for the period 1875 to 1910 from an unusually rich and detailed data set, and pooled cross-section time-series methods. Religion, ethnicity, and prevalence of mineworkers are the only statistically significant factors associated with marital fertility level. However, none of these are important predictors of marital fertility decline. Marital fertility decline in nineteenth-century Prussia is better predicted by increased womens labour force participation in non-traditional occupations, the growth of financial institutions, the development of a transport-communications infrastructure, reduction in infant mortality and improvements in education.

Household Structure in Fourteenth-Century Macedonia

Using data obtained from a fourteenth-century Serbian charter granting six villages to the monastery of Chilandar Athos the author examines the kinship structure of 127 households from that part of medieval Serbia now known as Yugoslav Macedonia. Household size and kinship structure are analyzed as a function of the length of the domestic cycle. The effects on this cycle length of post-marital residence net replacement rate sex ratio age at marriage and availability of land for expansion are investigated (ANNOTATION)

Demographic Consequences of Incest Tabus: A Microsimulation Analysis

Theories of incest tabus usually stress the psychosocial advantages of marriage regulation. But marriage regulation may produce delays in mating and thus loss of fertility to a population. Computer microsimulation experiments measure the amount of fertility that must be achieved outside a normatively specified marriage system in order to keep population constant. This amount varies directly with scope of tabu and inversely with population size. For populations of hundreds it is negligible, but for populations of dozens it can be very great. In the latter, flexibility of marital arrangements may permit maintenance of fertility without repeated revision of rules of marriage.

Age estimation from the number of teeth erupted in young children: An aid to demographic surveys

The reporting of children’s ages by parents is surprisingly inaccurate in many innumerate societies, but accurate knowledge of age is important for estimating recent changes in demographic rates. The timing of the eruption of children’s teeth is largely independent of environmental influences and can provide a relatively accurate and unbiased estimate of a child’s age. We have collected published data from 42 studies of children’s dentition and have transformed them into estimates of age for children with particular numbers of teeth. We present estimates for different populations, but the lack of significant differences between these estimates justifies the use of a standard set.

Urban versus Rural: Fertility Decline in the Cities and Rural Districts of Prussia, 1875 to 1910

Marital fertility in 54 Prussian cities and 407 Prussian Kreise (administrative areas) is analyzed using unusually rich and detailed socioeconomic and demographic data from eight quinquennial census between 1875 and 1910. Pooled cross-section time series methods are used to examine influences on marital fertility level and on marital fertility decline, focusing particularly on fertility differences according to level of urbanization. Increases in female labour force participation rate and income, the growth of financial services and communications, improvement in education, and reduction in infant mortality account for most of the marital fertility decline in 19th century Prussia. In 1875, rural and urban fertility were similar but by 1910, urban fertility was far lower than rural in part because the values of some of these variables changed more rapidly in the cities, and in part because some of these variables had stronger effects in urban settings.

Structural and behavioural changes in the short term preventive check in the northwest Balkans in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Fertility responded negatively to grain insufficiency(proxied by grain price increases), and mortality respondedpositively in Croatia-Slavonia-Srem in the 18thand 19th centuries, as in most of Europe. Shiftsin the intensity and timing of these responsesoccurred over time as social and economic structureschanged. Shifts in the elasticity of fertility withrespect to grain supply inversely mimic and lagchanges in the elasticity of mortality. Both appear tobe induced by increasing land shortage, the collapseof feudalism, and differences in the patterns ofadjustment to post-feudal conditions among former civiland military serfs. Generally, responses are strongerfor civil and former civil serfs, who may have been inless favourable economic circumstances than themilitary. Fertility responses in the year of a priceshock come to dominate those in the year following,suggesting a shift from contraception to abortion aseconomic and social conditions apparently worsened andstrategies of control intensified. Analysis of monthlyresponses supports the conjecture based on the annualresponses. The shift to the preventive check and strength of thepreventive check in the same year as the price shockis unusual in Europe and beyond. Analysis is based on25 parishes and employs lagged annual and monthly timeseries analysis with corrections for autocorrelation,in combination with ethnographic and historical data.

Fertility decline in Prussia: estimating influences on supply, demand, and degree of control.

Change in marital fertility in 407 Prussian Kreise from 1875 to 1910 is modeled to depend on the gap between the number of desired surviving births, N*, divided by child survival, s, and the number that would be born under natural marital fertility, M, given the age at marriage. Some fraction of this gap is averted, depending on the propensity to avert unwanted births, D. Although none of these components is observed directly, we can estimate each indirectly under strong assumptions. Decline in N*/s accounts for twice as much of the decline in fertility as does an increase in D. Natural fertility rose during the period. Unwanted births increased slightly, despite a tripling of births averted. The most important causes of decline in N* were increases in female labor supply, real income, and health workers. A rising level of education is the most important cause of increasing propensity to avert births. Demand-side changes were important causes of the transition, but changes in readiness to contracept also were important, as was the interaction of the two.

The Comparative Method in Anthropological Perspective

Comparison is an indispensable technique of analytic scholarship. No analytic statement about empirical observation can be made without at least one comparison providing the contrast that permits either inductive generalization or deductive proof. Comparison is used for these purposes in all disciplines, but not always in the same way, or for the same reasons. Anthropology came to comparison because comparison was thrust on it by the rediscovery of classical antiquity and the opening of Africa, Asia, and the New World to a previously more isolated Europe. Indeed, anthropology was born as a response to the great cultural contrasts thus exposed. This philosophical child of comparison, however, pursued it in some very special ways. In the first place, the initial interests of anthropology lay in the reconstruction of an unknown human past, attempting to explain cultural variety through the reconstruction of events leading up to the present. In the second place, the comparisons drawn by anthropologists were usually extreme, prompted as they were by the shock value of new discoveries.