Gender and Migration - Finally starting to get the attention it deserves!

Sorry for the prolonged silence!  I've been busy writing some pieces for CIRSD on the New Silk Road (or the 'One Belt, One Road' Initiative) and the difficulty involve in getting labor mobility onto high-level policy agendas.  I'm now deep into research for the next issue, and have been tasked with getting to trips with social trends and the movement of people on both sides of the Mediterranean.  I've learnt a lot, but the thing that has really captured my interested (perhaps not surprisingly!) is the increased focus on gender in the burgeoning literature on migration.  I want to take a very brief look at some of the literature here, in the hope that I can inspire you to dig a little deeper and discover some of the really fascinating work that's going on at the moment.

Before turning to look at that, however, I wanted to draw your attention to a particularly good piece on the current position of gender within the development agenda.  It's written by Charles Kenny and Sarah Dykstra of the Center for Global Development (CGD) and is a really neat summary of where there has been progress, where there is room for more, and how more can be achieved with the funds that the US has already earmarked for gender-related work.  You can access it here.  (Full disclosure:  Sarah is a friend of mine, and an absolute wonder woman.  We met in Sierra Leone, where she was leading the analysis of a very exciting health initiative targeting rural clinics.  But our friendship isn't why I'm recommending the article, which absolutely stands on its own merits.)

Turning to gender and migration, the first thing I want to stress is what an exciting area of research this currently is!  As the below graph shows, there has been a very rapid rise in the proportion of development articles that have been concerned with migration, and within this gender has also - from a low base - become an increasingly active area of exploration.  This should be, in itself, hugely encouraging.  And it is not just the number of papers that has increased, but that the scope of issues addressed has fundamentally expanded.


Figure 1 - Fraction of Development Articles relating to Migration and Gender

Source:  Clemens, Ozen and Rapoport (2014):  Migration and Development Research is Moving Far Beyond Remittances.  Accessible here.  

Why is gender research important within the migration literature?

Gender affects every aspect of the way in individual makes migration decisions, migrates, and assimilates into new areas.  Globally, the majority of migrants are men, and this led, for many years, to a single-minded focus on the types of migration patterns that are common amongst men, and the problems facing migrants of this sort.

This in turn led to the neglect of not only the female perspective, but also whole classes of migration that are dominated by women (such as domestic work) and issues that relate predominantly to women (such as the increased vulnerability to sexual exploitation or sex trafficking).  Migration has emerged as one of the most important means by which individuals can improve their income and economic prospects.  Understanding the barriers for women, and formulating appropriate policies to address them, is therefore a vital part of the effort to break down gender inequality.

The current literature shows a really encouraging willingness to tackle problems, but there is considerable more still to be done, and many fascinating areas still to be explored.

A couple of papers that particularly caught my imagination

(Again, a hat tip to Clemens et al here, who put me onto a number of these.)

Cortes (2014):  The phenomenon of young women migrating alone is a comparatively new one.  Many women from countries such as the Philippines are migrating to be house helps, or to look after children. This paper looks at what happens to the children who are left behind.  I particularly liked the identification strategy in this paper, as children with migrating fathers are used as the comparison group.  Her findings suggest that children with absent mothers do not do as well in school, even when the mother is sending home significant remittances.  I think this finding is particularly interesting as results such as this would be completely missed by standard migration research, which calculates costs and benefits only in standard material terms.  (I can't resist adding a couple of pictures here from a research trip that I took to Kenya and Ghana in 2013.  I don't know if these children had migrating mothers, but who doesn't like photos of cute kids?  I particularly love the brightly-colored uniforms.)

Kudo (2014):  This paper takes advantage of law changes in a number of villages in Tanzania, which enabled widows to inherit land.  This not only meant that widows were much more likely to marry again, but that they were less likely to migrate out of the villages where they had spend their married years.  Younger women were also more likely to migrate into villages with favorable land tenure systems, and overall the marriage rate of young women actually went up.  I like this paper a lot.  The status of widows in many countries is abysmal, with many losing the homes they have lived in for many decades or having to return to their birth families without a clearly defined place in that household. This is a particular problem in India, where widows often become homeless and drift to large cities, where they make up a desperately poor and vulnerable segment of society.  Law ownership laws are obviously not simple to change, but this study suggests that they may present a promising policy avenue in dealing with this issue.

Bertoli and Marchetta (2013):  This paper is unusual, in that it looks at how the migration of married men affects the wives they leave at home.  In particular, it looks at how the fertility decisions of Egyptian women whose husbands temporarily migrate to the Gulf are different from otherwise similar women whose husbands do not migrate.  This paper shows that families with a migrating male head actually have a larger number of children, perhaps reflecting how cultural norms (ie the large families of the Persian Gulf) are transmitted during migration.  The paper is careful to avoid branding this either good or bad - and I agree that the well-being implications are not clear cut - but I think this suggests an interesting line of further research: To what extent does temporary migration affect the opinions and aspirations of migrants?  How lasting are these effects?  I'm particularly excited by this research agenda, as I'm coming to believe that an increase in temporary worker schemes might be one way out of the migration deadlock in the Mediterranean, but it is absolutely vital that any proposed increase in such programs is accompanied by a thorough exploration of the social and cultural impacts of such schemes, both for migrants themselves and for those left back home.

Tiongson and Clemens (2014):  Again, this takes advantage of a policy change to explore the effects of migration on households.  A scheme in the Philippines sent migrants (both male and female) to highly-paid jobs in Korea.  These migrants were chosen in a quasi-random way, which means that migrants can be compared to non-migrants.  They find that one partner migrating has no effect on the labor force participation of the other partner (even though household income has increased considerably), but that there were significant shifts in the household decision-making process, with considerably more power accruing to the migrant/high wage earner.  This has all sorts of policy implications, given a long-standing finding in the development economics literature that men and women tend to make different decisions about household spending, with women tending to allocate more money towards the education of children. By this assessment, migration can be empowering, though there are, of course, many other factors to consider.

I really hope this has made you a little more excited about the current research around migration and gender!  There really is some great stuff going on, and I've really enjoyed having a genuine reason to dive into this literature.  I'm also excited for the next issue of Horizons, even though I'm only around for the research stage - it will be touching on these, and other, very important topics.