court against depopulation

A Russian advertising executive who sued her boss for sexual harassment lost her case after a judge ruled that employers were obliged to make passes at female staff to ensure the survival of the human race.

According to a recent survey (no link), 100 per cent of female professionals said they had been subjected to sexual harassment by their bosses, 32 per cent said they had had intercourse with them at least once and another seven per cent claimed to have been raped.

Eighty per cent of those who participated in the survey said they did not believe it possible to win promotion without engaging in sexual relations with their male superiors.

Women also report that it is common to be browbeaten into sex during job interviews, while female students regularly complain that university professors trade high marks for sexual favours.

Only two women have won sexual harassment cases since the collapse of the Soviet Union, one in 1993 and the other in 1997.

(The judge is female, most likely)

a year old respond to Putin's initiative

"... the authorities' wish to raise the birth rate is based on the idea that women and families want more children, but lack enough money and other resources to do so. So, the reasoning goes, if they are given apartments and more money, they will have more babies. There is no evidence to support this idea. Many countries in the world have higher living standards than Russia but the same or even lower fertility rates."

although the initiative is not a new born either

sourse: CS Monitor

In 2012 Russia remains depopulating

End of the year (2012) Rosstat vital statistics:

	Thousands			Per 1000 of population
	Jan-Dec		increase, decrease (-)	Jan-Dec		2012 as % of 2011
	2012г.	2011г.		2012г.	2011г.
Live Births	1896,3	1793,8	102,5	13,3	12,6	105,6
Deaths	1898,8	1925,0	-26,2	13,3	13,5	98,5
including children
before age 1	16,3	13,1	3,2	8,7	7,3	119,2
Natural increase, decrease   (-)	-2,5	-131,2		-0,02	-0,9	2,2
Marriages	1213,6	1316,1	-102,5	8,5	9,2	92,4
Divorces	642,0	669,4	-27,4	4,5	4,7	95,7

Alexandra Paul on overpopulation

Dec 12: Putin population policy

About 15 minutes of the 1.5-hour address was devoted to the demographic situation. We managed to transcribe the speech and translated it into English to share with you below.

Mr. Putin expressed his conviction that in the future having 3 children per family should become a norm. This should be achieved through a range of financial benefits for families with 2nd and 3rd children, helping women reconcile family and work and improving lodging conditions for lower middle class families. While the President underlined many times that his Government will do its best to ensure that women’s needs are met when deciding whether to have a child (state solutions should be based on combatting the reasons that population does not want to have children), last (2011) year had seen a number of restrictions imposed to women’s access to abortion.

Full speech (1,5 hours):

Part on demography (14 minutes) :  (some parts are missing here and are available in the full speech)


(script of the speech translated from Russian below)

• By the beginning of the year 2000, the population of Russia was reducing by 1 million annually. It seemed impossible to stop this catastrophy.
• After the launch of demographic programmes the population of the country stabilised, starting from the year 2010 is started to increase. This is our key achievement.
• Stability is the main condition for developing and improving life conditions (and people believed the government!)
• For Russia to be sovereign and powerful - we have to be "more" and we have to be "better" in our morals, competences, work, creativity
• Today the rate of working population 20-40 years in Russia is the largest among the developed countries in the world. But in 20 years this number can decrease by 1,5 times. This tendency will continue if we do nothing. We have to open life opportunities for these generations: have interesting jobs, launch businesses, get housing, establish big and strong families, raise many children, be happy in their own country.
• Otherwise just in few decades Russia will become a poor, hopelessly old by age country, unable to keep its independence and even its territory.
• Demographic programmes adopted in last decade are working.
• Population not only stabilised but started to grow. In January- September 2012 population grew by 200 000 persons. 5 months in a row (first time ever in the newest history of the country) - we are registering a natural increase of population. Birthrates became higher than death rates.
• Life expectancy today has increased by 2,5 years (for the past 4 years) and is over 70 years now.
• We have adopted a programme of providing "Family capital" for the birth of the second child - it is successful. It will be in force till the end of the year 2016.
• But I do not want to push our women to the birth of the second child! Our women know themselves what and when  to do. But we need to inform our citizens. We also need to think what to do with this programme after year 2016.
• As of year 2013 we will start providing additional benefits for third and following children - in those regions, where demographic situation is worse than the country average. These are 50 Federation subjects: central, north-west, trans-Volga and far-East federal districts.
• Besides I remind all heads of Federation subjects the need to develop own programmes of demographic development.
• Demographers stress that choice of the second child represent a potential choice for the third child. It is important that the family takes this step.
• Although some experts that I respect are doubtful about it, I am convinced: the norm in Russia should be a family with 3 children.
• But to ensure this a lot needs to be done. We need to create favorable conditions first and foremost for women. So that they should not fear that 2nd and following child would close their way to careers and good jobs. That it would make them limited to household work. What we started to do is: solving the long queues to the kindergartens; professional trainings for women with children; supporting flexible form of employment  - this will directly affect the choice of family for the second child.
• High attention should be paid to under-school facilities including supporting private facilities. Many obstacles to that have already been removed. I (Putin) request to completely clear out obstacles in the first half of the next year. Regions need to work more: everywhere should be open small and 'home-based' kindergardens as well as after-school hours facilities. Parents should have choice for these facilities without queues and stress.
• lodging problems should be solved and mortgage should be available to lower middle class families (teachers, doctors etc.)

Source: Marina Davidashvili, Senior Policy Officer, EPF

why women have no children

Women who choose to be permanently childfree perceive more social pressures to become mothers than other women, but feel less distress about not having kids than women who are childless from infertility or other reasons, a new national study shows:

• Motherhood is so highly connected with adult femininity (what is it?) in the United States that many women feel that they need to be mothers
• In recent years more U.S. women - estimates suggest about 20 percent - are ending childbearing years without having children. Some can't conceive because of biomedical infertility; others simply delay because of financial concerns, educational demands, job demands, not finding the right partner or other situational barriers. Guess, 3/4 of them simply did not want to have.
• influence from others to have children was associated with distress only if the women considered motherhood important
• as reproductive options have increased, both for limiting fertility and overcoming fertility barriers, we are learning what is devastating for some women is a relief for other women

including turning to the Virgin Mary for help

Over the course of 2011, this blog has from time to time drawn attention to the demographic malaise affecting Russia.  Shannon blogged back in April on the lack of men in that country and how alcohol addiction has played a large part in that problem.  Indeed, the decline in Russian population since the fall of the Iron Curtain has been simply remarkable and unprecedented – it was not without reason that the first international demographic summit was held in Moscow in June this year.  The Russian political leaders have tried to reverse their declining population, including turning to the Virgin Mary for help.
Now, in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs magazine, a world renowned demographer, Nicholas Eberstadt, has published a very informative article about Russia, entitled “The Dying Bear” (as you can imagine from the title, he does not envisage a very rosy future for Russia…) Unfortunately, the article is not available free online, so I can only link you to the opening few paragraphs and urge you to try and get hold of the article from somewhere.  In essence, Eberstadt argues that Russia is in trouble demographically due to its very high mortality rates.
The trouble is that Russia is a “net mortality society” – since 1992 (???), about 12.5 million more Russians have been buried than have been born.  Thus, since 1992 Russia’s population has fallen every year (except 1993 and 2010) and this decline has only been softened by immigration, mainly from former Soviet states.  Although Russia is not alone in the World in suffering population decline (Eberstadt points to Germany (earlier than Russia), Italy and Japan as countries that are about to enter into or are already in sustained population decline) the difference for Russia is that its health conditions are deteriorating, adding to already high death rates.  According to the Human Mortality Database, a research consortium, overall life expectancy at birth in Russia was slightly lower in 2009 than it was in Russia in 1961!  More shockingly, in 2009:

“…overall life expectancy at age 15 was estimated to be lower in Russia than in Bangladesh, East Timor, Eritrea, Madagascar, Niger and Yemen; even worse, Russia’s adult male life expectancy was estimated to be lower than Sudan’s, Rwanda’s, and even AIDS-ravaged Botswana’s.”

What is the cause of this terrible situation?  Apparently, it is due to:

“…an explosion (???) in deaths from cardio-vascular disease and what epidemiologists call ‘external causes’, such as poisoning, injury, suicide, homicide, traffic fatalities, and other violent accidents.”

Why Russia’s health is quite so bad though and why death rates are quite so high in an urbanized and literate, peacetime society is anyone’s guess.  “The brute fact is that no one understands why Russians are as unhealthy as they are.” (it's right;)
The Kremlin is not unaware of these facts and is trying to reverse this trend by introducing new public policies, including subsidies for mothers who have a second or third child.  Although these measures seem to have had some effect – birth rates have recently risen while death rates have decreased – there are some unavoidable features of Russia’s demographic future that will have to be overcome.  The first is that the recent birth slump has meant that there will be fewer potential mothers in the next few years:

“Women between 20 and 29 years of age bear nearly two-thirds of Russia’s babies.  In 2025, Russia is projected to have just 6.4 million women in their 20s, 45 percent fewer than today…[u]nder such circumstance, simply maintaining current national birth totals would require heroic upsurges in maternity.”

Added to this, Russia is getting older. By 2025, the proportion of the Russian population aged 65 years and older will have grown from 13 percent to almost 19 percent.  Thus, “[a]s a result of ageing alone, per capita mortality in Russia would rise by more than 20 per cent if nothing else changed.”
Taking all of this into account, “Russia is likely to remain a net mortality society for the foreseeable future”.  Russia’s federal statistics agency, Rosstat, envisions a cumulative total of deaths over births of between 4.7 and 9.5 million between 2011 and 2030.  The only way to forestall further depopulation is through massive immigration from abroad.  However, even this answer is not as complete as it once was.  Changes to education policies in former Soviet Union states means that immigrants from these countries are speaking less Russian than their parents did while Russian attitudes to immigrants has also grown less welcoming.
This is an excellent analysis by Eberstadt, but the one glaring omission in his piece is Russia’s obscenely high abortion rate.  Over a million abortions a year is surely a massive factor in Russia’s demographic decline!  Reducing this number would be one way to reduce the surfeit of deaths over births in Russia in the coming years.

read more about abortion's sources of population growth ;)