This paper examines the processes of knowledge production through which gender was taken up as a tool of population governance in demography. The paper begins with an explanation of the biopolitical rationalities of postwar population governance. It then examines how feminist demographers in the 1970s introduced the questions of women's status, employment, and child care as variables for studying demographic change in the West. In the 1980s, gender itself was introduced as an object of knowledge to be understood and analysed in order to make sense of Western fertility decline. Gender is thus theorised in the paper as a technology of biopower for the regulation of population through the reorganisation of the sexual division of labour.
