Assessing the `Femaleness' of a Population

Abstract

Conventional measures of the ‘ femaleness’ of a population – measures such as the female headcount ratio F and the sex- ratio S—are insensitive to the precise age-specific distribution of sex- ratios in the population. This paper attempts to correct for this neglect of variability in the age-wise distribution of sex- ratios, by advancing variants of F and S, called F and S respectively, which go some way in mitigating the misleadingness of wholly ‘mean- centred’ approaches to the measurement of ‘femaleness’ in a population.