One in four women experience a miscarriage. Loss of pregnancy may affect fertility intentions and lead to adverse mental and physical health. Yet, we know little about how social inequalities affect the risk of miscarriage; how miscarriages may exacerbate existing social inequalities in population health; or how context shapes these experiences. One reason for this is poor quality of data, as miscarriages are often either underreported in surveys or only included in health registers if they require hospital care. Moreover, to date, sexual and reproductive health has often been ignored in life course epidemiology. This proposal goes beyond the state-of-the-art by being the first comprehensive study of the patterns of social inequality in miscarriage and its outcomes. It reaches this goal by assessing the patterns of miscarriage underreporting in surveys before obtaining its estimates. It will make ground-breaking contributions by: 1) Analysing underreporting patterns of miscarriage and using this in further analyses to obtain more reliable results than before. 2) Showing how individual and family-level social inequalities affect miscarriage risk over the life course. 3) Establishing how mental and physical health consequences of miscarriage depend on one’s social background and may widen social inequalities in health. 4) Uncovering the role of national and sub-national context in social inequalities in miscarriage. Unlike many previous studies based on small and outdated samples, I use longitudinal population registers and large representative surveys in Finland, France and the UK that are exceptionally rich in miscarriage, socioeconomic, other reproductive and health data, and can be triangulated to obtain more reliable results. The project will lead to a significantly better understanding of a common reproductive experience affecting mental and physical wellbeing, and can help policy makers improve reproductive and population health.

The balance between work, family and private life is being disrupted by profound socio-economic, demographic and political changes that are reconfiguring individual life courses and calling for new and ambitious research. Understanding these changes is crucial for designing appropriate public and corporate policies. Given the lack of recent data on these issues, in 2018 we formed a team within INED's Economic Demography Unit to develop a large-scale statistical survey, the Longitudinal Survey Families and Employers (FamEmp). It consists of two parts, one with more than 35,000 individuals to be interviewed in 2024, 2027 and 2030, and the other with their employers, 12,000 establishments with 10 or more employees. The survey data will be linked to administrative data. The aim of the project is to use these unique data to measure current work-life balance conditions, their rapid evolution and their impact on economic, social and gender inequalities throughout the life course. The first axis of the project will take stock of the current state of work-life balance, both in general and in specific work and family configurations. In particular, the impact of new forms of employment (short-term contracts, self-employment) and work (teleworking) will be analysed. Attention will also be paid to specific family configurations, such as those following separation (shared custody, stepparents and single-parent families), which are at increase. The situation of family carers for people with disabilities or loss of autonomy, which raises new issues of reconciliation, will also be examined. In the second axis, the longitudinal dimension of the survey will be used to observe changes over the life cycle, with a particular focus on gender inequalities. We will identify turning points in careers, the interactions between family and work events and the causal mechanisms at work. In particular, the impact of childbirth on gender inequalities in careers will be better understood by examining the different career mobility of women and men during their working lives and the trade-offs within couples. In a third axis, the employer survey will allow us to examine companies' practices and assess whether the measures they take are likely to facilitate their employees' work-life balance. In the project, we will mobilise a wide range of quantitative analysis methods. The WorkLiB project responds to one of the major challenges of our time: how to better share time across life, within couples and according to gender. It will provide answers for public authorities and companies to develop targeted policies to improve the well-being of individuals (parents, children, carers) and promote equality between women and men. As part of an open science approach, the results will be widely disseminated and the data will be made available to the scientific community.

During the last four decades, trends in life expectancy differed between East and West of Europe considerably. The present project aims to provide new data on cause-of-death trends to be used in comparative studies and to serve as cornerstone in further explorations of relations between mortality trends and health policies. Within the next three years, the collaboration between INED and MPIDR on this topic will allow to get started new projects devoted to specific countries like Belarus, Moldavia and Eastern Germany in the same time as already existing projects will be finalized. It will benefit from the involvement of young researchers who will take in charge the reconstruction of coherent series of deaths by cause in several Eastern and Central European countries. The project is made up of four main parts. 1. The analysis of the health crisis in the former USSR since the 1960s will be completed. The series will be updated for Ukraine and a book devoted to the Baltic countries will be published. Belarus and Moldavia will be added in order to complete the puzzle. An international database will provide with all the reconstructed series. 2. Germany offers a valuable illustration of East-West divergence or convergence before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall. To compare the two parts of the country, data on causes of death need to be harmonized. The work already in progress for West Germany will be extended to East Germany and coherent series of deaths by cause will be reconstructed for the two countries since the 1960s. 3. Sub-national differences in mortality by cause will be considered more specifically: 40- year variations in geographical differences among 100 Russian oblasts and recent sociocultural inequalities in Lithuania. 4. Finally, the confrontation of all the reconstructed time-series (including Poland and the Czech Republic) with trends in socio-economic indicators and with implementation of health policies will be the basis for new highlights on health transition and a reappraisal of the reliability of the concept of divergence convergence process.

LGBT rights and non-discrimination policies towards gender and sexual orientation are at the top of the European Union’s priorities. Over the last decades, Western countries greatly improved the legal recognition of LGBTQ families, while an increasingly part of them are allowing same-sex couples to marry and to access adoption process and/or artificial reproductive technologies (ART). In France, same-sex couples can adopt children since their legal possibility to marry in 2013, but as there are very few minor children to adopt through the accredited adoption agencies, most of them try to develop other possibilities by conceiving their own biological children. The dramatic changes in the legal contexts simultaneously imply a generational shift in the routes to parenthood among LGBTQ people. However, the legal restriction preventing single women and women couples to access ART and the prohibition of surrogacy in France compel same-sex couples to engage "procreative migrations" in other countries, which carry economic inequalities. People who face strong barriers to achieve their parental desires thus may be lest satisfied with their life, face higher risks of depression and feel less support within their families of origin. Therefore, while most research focused on well-being among children raised by same-sex couples, access to parenthood also raises mental health issues among LGBTQ adults. Cross-national insights between France and US, using mixed methods in the two countries, will then highlight policy effects in the family lives of gender and sexual minorities, and thus challenge policy makers. The analysis of LGBTQ parenthood across generations will also contributing to enlighten social change. Consequently, the research project will lead to better understanding of LGBTQ families and the challenge they face, but also to initiating scientific discussions in France concerning their inclusion in surveys and research works.