Dr Paula Sheppard

paula sheppard

 

Departmental Lecturer in Evolutionary Anthropology
Director of Studies for Human Sciences, Wadham College (cover)

 

Bio

I am an Evolutionary Anthropologist interested in human families. I am especially interested in why people in rich countries are leaving it very late to start a family and end up having smaller families than they were hoping to. I have pioneered a new methodology to answer this question and early results show that, among other things, gender equality in childcare and being a hands-on dad is very important for highly-educated women. The qualitative findings from this project can be found here and a preprint to the main study is here. I am interested more generally in gender equity and how that plays out in the family sphere. 

I am also looking at the role of religiosity in buffering children from hardship in larger families using global data collected by the Templeton-funded project on the evolutionary dynamics of religion, family size, and child success.

Most of my work has used quantitative methods although recently I have found great value in using in depth qualitative methods to look at father-child bonding during lockdown, and my current work on why people are leaving it so late to have babies is a fully mixed methods approach.

I am a member of the SAME anti-racism group and a fellow of the Fertility and Reproduction Studies Group.

​After completing an MSc in Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology at Oxford and another MSc in Social Research Methods from the London School of Economics in 2011, I was awarded my PhD from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in 2014. I have been at Oxford since 2016 and am now a departmental lecturer in evolutionary anthropology and acting Director of Studies for Human Sciences at Wadham College.

 

Teaching

I teach Evolutionary Medicine and Public Health to Masters and Undergraduate students. This programme has an accompanying seminar series on my YouTube channel where you can see previous talks.

I also teach Practical Quantitative Methods to postgraduates at the School.
 

emph channel logo

 

 

Research interests

Family demography, life-history theory, reproductive decision-making, the evolutionary demography of religion.

 

I am not currently taking any more doctoral students.

 

Contact

Email: paula.sheppard@anthro.ox.ac.uk

Personal Website & Media

Twitter: @PaulaJSheppard

 

Current DPhil students
Selected Publications

Sheppard, P. and D. Coall (2023) The role of ontogeny in human evolutionary demography. Chpt 8 in Human Evolutionary Demography. Burger, O., R. Lee, and R. Sear (eds.) Open Book Publishers

Brough, M. and P. Sheppard (2022) Fertility decision-making in the UK: Insights from a qualitative study among British men and women. Social Sciences 11(9): 409

Sheppard, P. and M. Brough (2022) Father-toddler bonding during the Covid-19 lockdown: Qualitative insights from 17 families in Britain. Social Sciences 11(12): 542

Sheppard, P. and K. Snopkowski (eds.) (2021) The Behavioral Ecology of the Family. Special Issue in Social Sciences.

Sheppard, Paula. 2021. ‘Grandparental Investment’. In The Oxford Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology and Parenting, edited by Viviana A. Weekes-Shackelford and Todd Kennedy Shackelford. Oxford University Press.

Sheppard, Paula, and Zachary Van Winkle. 2020. ‘Using Sequence Analysis to Test If Human Life Histories Are Coherent Strategies’. Evolutionary Human Sciences 2. https://doi.org/10.1017/ehs.2020.38.

Sheppard, Paula, Mark Pearce, and Rebecca Sear. 2016. ‘How Does Childhood Socioeconomic Hardship Affect Reproductive Strategy? Pathways of Development’. American Journal of Human Biology 28 (3): 356–63.

Sheppard, Paula, Justin R Garcia, and Rebecca Sear. 2015. ‘Childhood Family Disruption and Adult Height: Is There a Mediating Role of Puberty?’ Evolution, Medicine, and Public Health 2015 (1): 332–42.