Seminars

In recent decades, a growing share of people have reported feeling rushed, stressed, and short of time to meet daily demands, prompting renewed attention to the concept of time poverty. Defined as a persistent condition in which individuals face excessive demands and insufficient time to meet them (Goodin et al., 2005), time poverty limits quality of life and restricts social participation and future opportunities. This growing sense of time poverty is closely linked to profound changes in time-use patterns, which have substantially increased overall time demands, particularly affecting families. Building on these insights, this study draws on data from time-use surveys conducted in seven Western countries from the late 1980s to the 2020s to determine whether time poverty has become more prevalent over time while accounting for parental status and gender. Our results reveal a growing parental gap in time poverty, although with notable cross-country variations. Overall, the rise in parental time poverty is primarily explained by behavioural changes in time use, while compositional factors play a secondary but meaningful role. 

February 19th, 2026 / 11:30 - 12:30

Aula Seminari (Ex Aula III), Department of Statistics "Paolo Fortunati", Alma Mater Studiorum University of Bologna

Demography has long been the science of life courses — tracing how individuals move through education, work, family, and health across time and generations. Yet, despite massive advances in data availability, from full-population registries to linked longitudinal surveys, our capacity to predict life outcomes remains strikingly limited. This talk explores why. Drawing on results from studies in ODISSEI such as the Predicting Fertility (PreFer) challenge, I show that even with abundant data and compute, predictive accuracy for fundamental demographic events like childbearing remains modest. These limits reveal not only the boundaries of data and modeling, but also the inherent unpredictability of human lives. Building on these findings, I outline a vision for foundational models in demography: large-scale, general-purpose models trained on population-wide life-course sequences. Inspired by language models such as BERT and GPT, these models treat life events as tokens in a “biographical language”, learning representations that capture the social, temporal, and network structures underlying human trajectories. I demonstrate how this approach—applied to the entire Dutch population through Statistics Netherlands and ODISSEI infrastructure—can produce life-course embeddings capable of predicting income, partnership, and fertility dynamics years into the future, while retaining interpretability and ethical safeguards. Together, these results suggest a new methodological frontier for demography: one that acknowledges the limits of predictability revealed by challenges like PreFer, but also leverages foundation models to systematically learn from the full grammar of life. The talk concludes by reflecting on what this convergence of demography and machine learning implies for theory, policy, and the future of population research.

November 13th, 2025 / 11.30-12.30

Aula Seminari (Ex Aula III), Departments of Statistics “Paolo Fortunati”, Alma Mater Studiorum University of Bologna

The fertility decline experienced in high-income countries during the last 15 years challenges scholars to look “beyond the economic gaze” (Comolli et al. 2021). Lower fertility is largely related to later family formation and higher proportions of singlehood and childlessness, factors which are not fully explained by socioeconomic and labour market conditions. My talk uses the concept of reproductive cues to analyse how information and communication technologies (ICT) shape childbearing today. I present evidence from demographic and psychological research literature as well as first results from our Finnish family barometer 2024 survey concerning associations between screen time, social media use, and fertility ideals. The biological concept reproductive cues refers to environmental signals for when it is a good time to have and raise offspring. Crucially, such childbearing cues can also signal when is not a good time to reproduce. I argue that ICT-technologies and especially the spread of social media can shape childbearing cues in both indirect and direct ways. Indirect ways include effects of screen time on mental health, the dynamics of partnering, and the quality and duration of romantic relationships of young adults. Direct pathways include effects of ICT use on sexual maturation and sexual behaviour, and on the perceptions and values attached to pregnancy and motherhood. Overall fertility effects of ICT technologies can be negative, neutral or positive, and appear to be mediated by whether they strengthen close offline social relationships or not.

October 16th, 2025 / 11.30-12.30

Aula Seminari (Ex Aula III), Deparment of Statistics “Paolo Fortunati”, Alma Mater Studiorum University of Bologna