By studying Finland’s population at the end of World War II, an international team of researchers found that women living in cities were less likely to become mothers. In question, according to them: a lower percentage of men residing in urban areas. A pattern that has similarities with the situation today in large cities.
- Women residing in cities are 15% less likely to have children, compared to women living in rural areas.
- Data collected by researchers in Finland, dating from after 1945, show that if the birth rate is lower in urban areas, it is because the sex ratio is unfavorable to women.
- Unlike the countryside, there are more women than men residing in the cities, which reduces their chances of finding a partner, and therefore of having children.
Are women living in cities less likely to become mothers than those living in rural areas? This is the thesis defended by an international research team in the journal Behavioral Ecology.
In a new study published by Oxford University Press, researchers from the University of Turku and University of Helsinki (Finland) and Pennsylvania State University (USA) studied a mass internal migration event that occurred in Finland during World War II. They concluded that a female-biased sex ratio, i.e. having more females than males in a population, caused a decline in births in towns.
Data collected after the Second World War
After the Second World War, Finland had to cede 10% of its territory to the USSR, which led to the migration of 400,000 citizens. The Finnish government then implemented a colonization law allowing each evacuated villager to benefit in compensation from new lands in the west of the country.
To better understand these population movements, the researchers consulted a database of evacuees, who responded to interviews between 1968 and 1970. They were therefore able to access different information such as their name, sex, year. of marriage, their number of children, and the years and names of all places the evacuee has lived from birth to the time of the interview.
In total, the reproductive and dispersal decisions of 8,296 females aged 19-42, evacuated from 1945-1955, were studied. The researchers measured the sex ratios in the places of residence of these women throughout this period and estimated the probability for the women to start a family or to disperse.
Urban women are 15% less likely to have children
The researchers then found that the probability of reproducing was strongly influenced by the local sex ratio, but that this relationship differed between rural and urban environments. Thus, while a sex ratio unfavorable to males decreased the probability for females to reproduce for the first time in urban environments, this was not the case in rural areas.
Note, however, that women did not move to areas where there were more men, but rather to urban areas, where there were fewer of them. The researchers therefore concluded that the women probably moved to urban areas for work and education, but then faced a competitive market to find a spouse and were therefore less likely to have children than women who lived outside urban areas.
Overall, women were 15% less likely to reproduce in urban areas than in rural areas. In cities, each percentage increase in the number of men in the population increased the likelihood of women having a first child by 2.7%, while in rural areas the increase was only 2.7%. 0.4%.
According to the authors of the study, the conclusions drawn from these “historical” data are very applicable to current urban environments. Women outnumber men in many cities in both developing and developed countries, and they may find themselves in the same predicament as Finnish women decades ago.
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