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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | Migration’s gender angle by Jayati Ghosh

Migration’s gender angle by Jayati Ghosh

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published Published on Oct 8, 2009   modified Modified on Oct 8, 2009

Women currently make up around half of the world’s migrant population, even without taking into consideration short-term and seasonal movements. Despite the widespread prevalence of female migration, there are still some common stereotypes about its nature: that it is mostly women and girls accompanying their male heads of household, or dominantly by young, unmarried women, mostly for marriage or for some defined work enabled by contractors. Yet the migration of women for reasons other than marriage is both more widespread and more complex than is often suspected. Indeed, there is a remarkable diversity of migration patterns among women, and such diversity has increased along with recent economic and social changes in both sending and receiving locations.

Women migrate for long and short periods, over short and long distances. They move for many reasons, of which marriage is only one and among which work is becoming increasingly significant. Young women dominate in migration, but older women migrate as well. They move with or without their families. Both single and married women migrate. Indeed, there is growing evidence of women who have borne children moving for work, leaving the care of their children with family members who remain at home.

International migration for work shows clear demarcations and separate niches for male and female labour. Male migrants tend to be concentrated in the production and construction sectors, and to a much lesser extent in service activities. Female migrants, by contrast, are dominantly found to be working in specific service activities — in the domestic work and care sectors, as well as in entertainment work.

While the driver of the supply of migrant workers may be similar across men and women, the basic demand forces driving women’s migration for work are quite different from those of men. This is particularly true for cross-border migration. Since female migrant workers are dominantly in the care and entertainment sectors, demand for such workers is less dependent upon the economic cycle and more dependent upon longer run demographic and social tendencies in the receiving countries. Ageing societies require more care providers. Societies in which women are more active in paid work participation, especially in higher-income activities, need more domestic workers.

One significant feature that flows from this gendered migration is the impact on remittances. Total remittance flows to developing countries are estimated to be nearly $300 billion in 2009, significantly more than all forms of capital flows put together. This has provided crucial foreign exchange and been a major contributor to balance of payments stability to countries as far apart as the Philippines and Guatemala, and even for large countries like India and China it has played a significant role in domestic consumption.

What has been more surprising to several observers is that remittance flows have not declined in many countries despite the onset of the global recession. This is contrary to the projections made by the World Bank and others that predicted substantial decline in remittances. But to some extent this too can be expected, because even if the crisis leads to large-scale retrenchment of migrant workers who are forced to come home, they would obviously return with their accumulated savings. In such a case, there could even be a (temporary) spike in remittances rather than a continuous or sharp decline because of the crisis. Eventually, as the adverse conditions for overseas employment further aggravate, this would then lead to decline in remittance inflows.

But even that need not happen, and remittances could continue to increase — and one factor behind this is the gender dimension. In the first place, female migrants are far more likely to send remittances home, and typically send a greater proportion of their earnings back. Also, male migrant workers find that incomes are much more linked to the business cycle in the host economy, so their employment and wages tend to vary with output behaviour. Thus job losses in the North during this crisis have been concentrated in construction, financial services and manufacturing, all dominated by male workers.

By contrast, the care activities dominantly performed by women workers tend to be affected by other variables such a demographic tendencies, institutional arrangements, and the extent to which women work outside the home in the host country. So employment in such activities is often relatively invariant to the business cycle, or at least responds to a lesser extent. Therefore, female migrant workers’ incomes are more stable over the cycle and do not immediately rise or fall to the same extent.

This in turn means that source countries that have a disproportionately higher share of women out-migrants (such as the Philippines and Sri Lanka) would tend to experience less adverse impact in terms of downturn of remittances. Indeed, in both countries, most recent data indicates that remittance flows are still increasing. This does not mean that there will be no impact at all, but certainly the adverse effects will be less and will take longer to work through than if the migration had been dominated by male workers.

The extent to which migration is empowering for women or simply reinforces oppressive and patriarchal patterns depends upon the nature of the migration. But it also depends upon official policy. Currently, very few host countries have legislation specifically designed to protect migrant workers, and there is little official recognition of the problems faced by women migrants in particular. The same is true for the sending countries, which accept the remittances sent by such migrants, but without much fanfare or gratitude, and tend to make little attempt to improve the conditions of these workers in the employment abroad.

Indeed, as noted earlier, there are often additional legal restrictions on the migration of women, which put additional constraints on their mobility. Women migrants, who typically are drawn by the attraction of better incomes and living conditions or by very adverse material or social conditions at home, are therefore in a "no-woman’s land" characterised by a generalised lack of protection. It is now more important than ever to fill this very obvious policy gap.


 


The Asian Age, 8 October, 2009, http://www.asianage.com/presentation/leftnavigation/opinion/op-ed/migration’s-gender-angle.aspx
 

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