Gross Reproduction Rate

The gross reproduction rate is the average number of daughters a woman would bear over her lifetime if she experienced a given set of age-specific fertility rates and survived through all her childbearing years. It is a single-sex reproduction measure: by counting only daughters, it tracks how a generation of women replaces itself, ignoring the mortality that would thin the next generation. As such it sits between the total fertility rate, which counts all children, and the net reproduction rate, which discounts daughters for the chance of dying before they themselves reproduce.