Mary K. Shenk, Mary C. Towner, Howard Kress, Nurul Alam
The demographic transition is an ongoing global phenomenon in which high fertility and mortality rates are replaced by low fertility and mortality. Despite intense interest in the causes of the transition, especially with respect to decreasing fertility rates, the underlying mechanisms motivating it...
Kristin Snopkowski, Mary C. Towner, Mary K. Shenk, Heidi Colleran
Women's education has emerged as a central predictor of fertility decline, but the many ways that education affects fertility have not been subject to detailed comparative investigation. Taking an evolutionary biosocial approach, we use structural equation modelling to examine potential pathways bet...
Mary K. Shenk, Kathrine Starkweather, Howard Kress, Nurul Alam
This paper examines the effects of three different types of father absence on the timing of life history events among women in rural Bangladesh. Age at marriage and age at first birth are compared across women who experienced different father presence/absence conditions as children. Survival analyse...
Mary K. Shenk, Mary C. Towner, Emily A. Voss, Nurul Alam
This paper uses the framework of intensive and extensive kinship systems to organize and understand a large body of research on consanguineous marriage across cultures, particularly studies in demography and development that document decreasing consanguineous marriage with market integration. We arg...
Cody T. Ross, Paul L. Hooper, Jennifer E. Smith, Adrian V. Jaeggi et al.
To address claims of human exceptionalism, we determine where humans fit within the greater mammalian distribution of reproductive inequality. We show that humans exhibit lower reproductive skew (i.e., inequality in the number of surviving offspring) among males and smaller sex differences in reprod...
Kathrine Starkweather, Mary K. Shenk, Richard McElreath
Evolutionary treatments of women's work and the sexual division of labour derive from sexual selection theory and focus on an observed cross-cultural trend: tasks performed by women tend to be more compatible with childcare and produce less economic risk than tasks performed by men. Evolutionary mod...
Mary K. Shenk, Anne Morse, Siobhán M. Mattison, Rebecca Sear et al.
Malnutrition among women of reproductive age is a significant public health concern in low- and middle-income countries. Of particular concern are undernutrition from underweight and iron deficiency, along with overweight and obesity, all of which have negative health consequences for mothers and ch...
Abigail E. Page, Erik J. Ringen, Jeremy Koster, Monique Borgerhoff Mulder et al.
While it is commonly assumed that farmers have higher, and foragers lower, fertility compared to populations practicing other forms of subsistence, robust supportive evidence is lacking. We tested whether subsistence activities-incorporating market integration-are associated with fertility in 10,250...
Robert Lynch, Susan B. Schaffnit, Rebecca Sear, Richard Sosis et al.
Human social relationships, often grounded in kinship, are being fundamentally altered by globalization as integration into geographically distant markets disrupts traditional kin based social networks. Religion plays a significant role in regulating social networks and may both stabilize extant net...
Kristin K. Sznajder, Katherine Wander, Siobhán M. Mattison, Elizabeth Medina-Romero et al.
BACKGROUND: Among Bangladeshi men, international labor migration has increased ten-fold since 1990 and rural to urban labor migration rates have steadily increased. Labor migration of husbands has increased household wealth and redefined women's roles, which have both positively and negatively impac...
Kristin K. Sznajder, Mary K. Shenk, Nurul Alam, Rubhana Raqib et al.
Anemia accounts for 8.8% of total disability burden worldwide. Betel quid use among pregnant women has been found to increase anemia risk. Betel quid is prepared by wrapping the betel (or areca) nut, with spices and other additions, in betel or tobacco leaf and it is chewed or placed in the mouth. W...
Mary K. Shenk, Mary C. Towner, Kathrine Starkweather, Curtis Atkisson et al.
Susan B. Schaffnit, Abigail E. Page, Robert Lynch, Laure Spake et al.
Success in marriage markets has lasting impacts on women's wellbeing. By arranging marriages, parents exert financial and social powers to influence spouse characteristics and ensure optimal marriages. While arranging marriages is a major focus of parental investment, marriage decisions are also a s...
Laure Spake, Anushé Hassan, Susan B. Schaffnit, Nurul Alam et al.
Researchers in the biological and behavioural sciences are increasingly conducting collaborative, multi-sited projects to address how phenomena vary across ecologies. These types of projects, however, pose additional workflow challenges beyond those typically encountered in single-sited projects. Th...
Lauren Newmyer, Lisa McAllister, Nurul Alam, Mary K. Shenk
Mortality and fertility are important, intricately linked drivers of population change. Although past demographic research has focused largely on population-level mortality rates, individual-level mortality experiences can also shape fertility. The timing of mortality exposure over the life course m...