Edith Gray is Professor at the School of Demography in the Australian National University’s Research School of Social Sciences. Her research area is family demography, particularly childbearing in Australia and other middle and high-income countries, with a focus on social-policy setting. She has been a Chief Investigator on six ARC Discovery Projects on family formation, fertility, dissolution and life course trajectories. She is also Co-Convenor of the Population Lab.

Edith is an elected Council member on the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population, and Vice-President of the Asian Population Association. She was Chair of the National Organising Committee for the International Population Conference, Brisbane 2025. She also provides research expertise through government and non-government consultancies, is the immediate past Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Population Research (2007-2014), and was the Convenor of the 20th Biennial Australian Population Association conference held in Canberra in 2022.

BA (UC), GradDip (Population Health), MA (Demography), PhD (Demography) (ANU)

Family change

My main area of research is family demography. I am currently involved in researching the following areas:

• Fertility, having children, contraceptive use
• Inequality in family formation
• Repartnering, cohabitation and living-apart-together relationships
• Parenting
• Men's involvement in family life
• Civic involvement

Other research interests

• Data quality
• Use of longitudinal data
• Ethical issues in research