Research

Melanie joined the Oxford Institute of Population Ageing in January 2014 to work on the Collen Programme.  Prior to this she worked as a Research Fellow in the Division of Social Statistics and Demography at the University of Southampton where she studied relationship dynamics and HIV/AIDS in South Africa.  She has also worked for the United Nations Statistics Division in New York, where she primarily worked on the methodology for producing statistics on violence against women as well as gender statistics more widely. Additionally, she worked on the Young Lives project (Department of International Development, University of Oxford), where the majority of her work was focussed on educational inequalities in India and Ethiopia.

Melanie is a trained demographer and social statistician, and her primary areas of research interest are the drivers of fertility transition in developing countries, son preference, and gender statistics.   She has expertise in the demography of both Asia and Africa, with a focus on Nepal and South Asia.  Her doctoral thesis, entitled “Fertility and the Economic Value of Children: Evidence from Nepal”, was an in depth study of the relationship between fertility decision making and two of the main components of income in rural Nepal – agricultural landholding and remittances. 

Currently her research mainly focuses on son preference, and sex-selective abortion in South Asia.  In particular she is PI of a project called “Evidence and Action for Reducing Sex-Selective Abortion in Nepal” in partnership with CREHPA (The Center for Research on Environment, Health and Population Activities), Nepal.  This includes both a quantitative element – analysing trends in sex ratios from the 2011 Nepal Population Census – and a qualitative element – interviewing key stakeholders and policy makers in the Kathmandu Valley about the causes of sex-selection and effective policy interventions.  She is also working on cross-country comparisons of son preference and contraceptive use, discriminatory feeding practices, and fertility preferences.

Recent professional commitments

Editor of the British Society of Population Studies Newsletter

Recent presentations

Asian Population Association, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, 27-30 July 2015

• Fertility Preferences in Nepal, co-authored with Yagya Karki
• The Manifestation of Son Preference in Pakistan: Evidence from Three Demographic and Health Surveys
• Skewed sex ratios and sex-selective abortions in Nepal: An analysis using census data, co-authored with Gyanendra Bajracharya (Central Bureau of Statistics, Nepal), Mahesh Puri (CREHPA, Nepal), Stuart Basten (Department of Social Policy and Intervention, University of Oxford)

British Society for Population Studies, Leeds, UK, 7-9 September 2015

• Religion or national context? Examining Hindu-Muslim differentials in the demographic manifestations of son preference across South Asia, co-authored with Ridhi Kashyap (University of Oxford)
• Skewed sex ratios and sex-selective abortions in Nepal: An analysis using census data, co-authored with Gyanendra Bajracharya (Central Bureau of Statistics, Nepal), Mahesh Puri (CREHPA, Nepal), Stuart Basten (Department of Social Policy and Intervention, University of Oxford)