Gender and migration
By no means all societies organize domestic
Donna R. Gabaccia
Beginning with the first demographic studies
of international migration in the 19th century,
scholars have documented differences in male
and female migrations and have considered sex
an important influence on the propensity to
migrate. For thirty years, feminist scholars have
differentiated between sex and gender, assert-
ing that social and ideological relations of
power (“gender relations”) are more important
than biology in shaping migration patterns.
Gender, they claim, influences who migrates, in
which proportions (the “sex ratio”), and with
which goals and motives. Gender shapes the
paths and organization of migration streams,
the ways states intervene to encourage or dis-
courage migration, the outcomes of migration
for areas of emigration and immigration and,
finally, immigrants’ integration or assimilation,
identities and lives. Indeed, evidence has accu-
mulated that every point in the migration
process is gendered.
Differential sex ratios and migration
Best known among demographers for his early
research, geographer E. G. Ravenstein (1885,
1889) found in the 1870 British census evi-
dence on sex ratios suggesting females were
more migratory than males but that females
moved shorter distances. Although subsequent
scholarship confirmed Ravenstein’s findings
for Western countries in the late 19th and 20th
centuries, no studies have tested Ravenstein’s
“law” for societies in Asia or Africa. Recent
work suggests that differential mobility by sex
in Ravenstein’s day was limited to one age
group – young, unmarried adults. In Raven-
stein’s Europe large numbers of single women
traveled short distances to work as servants in
adjoining rural counties or in the homes of
The Encyclopedia of Global Human Migration, Edited by Immanuel Ness.
© 2013 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2013 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
DOI: 10.1002/9781444351071.wbeghm244
Britain’s labor-hungry urban middle classes.
service this way; even in Europe in the early
modern period, males were as likely as females
to work as servants. In parts of Asia, household
slaves also included significant numbers of
both sexes. And in China, the patrilineal expec-
tation that daughters joined the kin group of
the men they married meant that even a short
distance was as culturally significant and dra-
matic as a longer distance was for males.
Still, the notion that males are “naturally”
more mobile than females is a persistent and
powerful one. In creating a recent typology,
migration historian Patrick Manning (2005)
distinguished “home-community migrations”
(in which predominantly women move to
marry or work among “their own kind”) and
whole-community migrations (in which the
sex ratio is evenly balanced) from coloniza-
tion migrations (which Manning – apparently
drawing exclusively on evidence from the early
modern and modern histories of European
empire-building – characterizes as “mostly
male”) and from cross-community migrations,
again understood to be mostly male. Since
Manning sees cross-community migrations as
distinguishing humans from other migratory
animals and driving development and social
change, his typology marginalizes females as
historical agents and transforms most into
dependents of the more adventuresome, risk-
taking males.
Recent studies based on uneven historical
data point both to considerable variations in
sex ratios over time and space and towards a
worldwide shift, occurring in the first half of
the 20th century, toward higher proportions
of long-distance female travelers. During the
transatlantic slave trade between 1500 and
1890, both European shippers and purchasers
preferred African boys and men for work
on New World plantations, even though girls
and women were the main agriculturalists in
2 gender and migration
many West African societies. Despite Euro-
peans’ cultural preferences, sex ratios varied
and shipments from some sites in coastal Africa
to some destinations in the Americas at times
included balanced numbers of males and
females or even, occasionally, female majori-
ties. Scholars have no easy explanations for
these variations although they do note that the
male-predominant Atlantic slave trade differed
from both internal African and Middle Eastern
trades, where females often predominated,
perhaps because both their domestic and
reproductive labors were highly valued and
actively sought.
Gender, labor, and international
migration
For the 19th-century mass migrations that
built empires, replaced indigenous peoples
with foreign-born cultivators of grain on
former grasslands, and provided labor for
middle class kitchens, mines, and factories,
gender ratios also varied considerably even
when males generally outnumbered females,
at times by substantial majorities. Imperial
schemes to export “surplus females” to Britain’s
colonies, family-based but more autonomous
migrations of European cultivators to the fron-
tiers of Russia, Australia, and the Americas,
long-distance migrations by young women in
search of employment as domestic servants
(for example, from places like Ireland or
Jamaica), and migrations of racially or reli-
giously persecuted minorities (such as the
Jewish population of Russia) could all result in
relatively balanced sex ratios. By the early 20th
century, furthermore, a worldwide shift toward
greater representations among females could
be noted. Although this shift is best docu-
mented for nations of immigration such as the
United States and Canada, recent research on
migrations from China to southeast Asia and
to further Pacific destinations suggest a similar
shift even among migrations that had earlier
been heavily (as high as 75–90 percent) male.
Unfortunately, little international data on
the gendering of migration has been compiled
for the violent and chaotic years of depression
and warfare of the mid-20th century. However,
by 1960, when the UN again began publishing
data on the sex of immigrant populations,
gender balance already characterized foreign-
ers living in the United States and a number of
other wealthier nations: globally, 45 percent
of international migrants were female in 1960.
This trend toward gender balance became
more spatially extensive with each subsequent
decade, with the exceptions of migrations into
Africa and Asia, where proportions female
dropped. Both the western Asian and African
oil industries demanded male workers, while
in the rapidly industrializing East Asian “tigers,”
demand for labor was more gender-balanced.
Today, international migrants are as likely to be
female as male.
Scholars have not yet satisfactorily explained
this gendered transition in international migra-
tion, although its timing suggests it is neither
a product of recent globalization nor of Western
feminists’ demands for greater gender equity.
The migrant and female caregiver from impov-
erished countries who cares for the home, chil-
dren, sick or elderly of more advanced nations
is one important symbol of today’s gender-
balanced migration but the other is the woman
trafficked into sex work. Almost invisible among
such images are the large numbers of female
international students and professionals who
seek work, and often marry and form house-
holds, as a result of their tourist adventures,
studies, or employment in business, profes-
sional, or technical positions.
Gender migration and power
To understand the complex gendering of
migration, Patricia Pessar and Sarah Mahler
have called upon scholars to analyze what they
call “gendered geographies of power.” With this
term, the two anthropologists point to the
many points in migration systems or “diaspo-
ras” where gender produces variance in migra-
tory behaviors, experiences, and identities. The
gender ideologies of sending regions affect
work, education, and family roles in ways that
matter in the organization of long-distance
mobility. States may be particularly concerned
about the mobility of population segments, for

example children (whose education costs may
be significant), women (often understood to be
the reproducers of the nation or of national
cultures), draft-age men or minorities – whom
states may wish to expel in order to achieve
national homogeneity. Notions of citizenship
can either restrict or facilitate incorporation
into a new nation for males and females.
Whether in the sending or receiving societies,
employers can recruit and motivate very differ-
ent types of labor migrations, depending upon
their understanding of the appropriate gender-
ing of wage-earning and other kinds of work.
The gendered responsibilities of family
members and public institutions for the repro-
duction of language, culture, identity, and
community may also make mobile women or
men the focus of intense scrutiny both in the
societies they leave behind and the societies
they enter.
Marginalization of women migrants
So many traditional societies are understood
by scholars to limit the independence and
autonomy of females, that job-seeking males
have long been imagined as the migratory
norm, rendering invisible the power and
decision-making of females. Yet evidence has
accumulated that shows, at least for Europe,
the greater long-distance mobility of males is
often a product of their marginal roles in sub-
sistence production and the reproduction of
the family unit. Many scholars have noted that
when males migrate it is sometimes connec-
tions maintained by female kin that lead them
to follow an uncle, male cousin, or brother-in-
law. While 19th-century literature tended to
portray adult women as reluctant emigrants
who suffered from homesickness more than
men, more recent studies point to mothers as
instigators of migration and as cultural risk-
takers, more willing than fathers, for example,
to accept cultural change among children.
While wage-earning may be the ultimate
goal of male labor migrants, their destinations
and the timing of their migrations are often
driven more by changes within families and by
strategies, including about marriage and child-
gender and migration 3
bearing, which involve decision-making by
females. Furthermore, with circulation and
return common among 19th and 20th century
migrants, women remaining at home often take
over tasks and responsibilities of the migrated
men (Pedraza 1991; Pessar & Mahler 2003).
Many societies, past and present, have seen
mobile women as alternatively sexually vulner-
able and sexually predatory. The states of both
sending and receiving societies have at times
created and funded institutions or laws meant
to protect traveling women and children. In the
19th century, reformers in Europe and America
became obsessed with the possibility that
procurers and pimps preyed on traveling Euro-
pean women, luring them into a “white slave
trade.” Almost all Chinese women traveling
across the Pacific were assumed to be prosti-
tutes and, after 1875, were excluded from the
United States on those grounds. As this sug-
gests, women are often scrutinized carefully at
borders, where agents might question their
ability to support themselves or even view
them as potential paupers – “liable to become
a public charge,” in the terminology of US
immigration control – or as potential sex
workers. Today, by contrast, many wealthy
nations privilege spouses and minor children
of migrants already living and working as per-
manent residents or naturalized citizens, and
evidence suggests that more wives than husbands
take advantage of such provisions (Gabaccia
1994; Boyd & Pikkov 2005; UN Population
Fund 2006; Donato et al. 2011). At the same
time, many residents of Europe and United States
express alarm about the rise in international
marriages, a practice they wrongly associate with
trafficking, sex work, and immigration fraud.
Whether they migrate independently as
domestic servants, caregivers, or professionals,
or as members of family groups, immigrant
women tend to take jobs that are different from
men and also often different from native
women. During the great age of mass migra-
tions and industrialization around the Atlantic
Ocean, immigrant women were more likely to
work for wages than native women but they
worked primarily in jobs designated as female,
in the so-called “light industries” (textiles,
4 gender and migration
garments, food processing) and in domestic
service, while immigrant men worked in agri-
culture, mining and “heavy” industries (such as
steel, construction, chemical, or automobile
industries).
South to North gendered migration
The shift in prosperous Western societies from
industrial to service-based economies in the
20th century drove a shift toward greater
employment among all women, native- and
foreign-born. Many scholars trace changes in
sex ratios among international migrants to the
growing demand internationally for female
care workers. As employment opportunities
for native women improved in the last decades
of the 20th century in prosperous countries,
employed professional women sought to
replace their unpaid domestic labor with
women wage workers, many of them foreign
in origin. Whether in Dubai, Hong Kong,
New York, London, or Rome, the figure of the
nanny and all-purpose household helper again
became a ubiquitous feature of middle-class
households. But demand for female caregiving
is no longer limited exclusively to low-wage
domestic service and childcare. Especially in
countries with limited welfare states or where
populations resist providing institutional care
for the elderly, the immigrant provider of
eldercare has also become common. In health
care, too, wealthy countries now import nurses,
hospital doctors, and home health-care aids,
and women are disproportionately represented
in these fields, too.
Immigrant women also number among the
highly trained and paid professional and tech-
nical workers who now constitute a substantial
minority of immigrant populations in a few
countries such as the United States. As access
to higher education for women improved
during the 20th century, the numbers of female
international students increased. Like their
male counterparts, many female graduates of
engineering, managerial, technical, and medical
programs in the United States or Germany seek
positions in the countries where they have
studied rather than returning to their home-
lands as they may have originally intended.
Also carefully watched by natives are the
reproductive choices of foreign-born women.
When immigrants’ fertility rate surpass those
of native women, natives’ fears of imminent
cultural conquest or – as it was called at the
beginning of the 20th century – “race suicide”
also increase. Natives also commonly assume
that mothers remain a key font of cultural con-
servatism, teaching the “mother tongue” and
attempting to hold children to the values and
customs of homeland cultures. Girls reared in
immigrant families – from the 19th to the 21st
century – have been particularly likely to write
about the difficulties in fulfilling expectations
of both their host society and parents in terms
of sexual modesty, academic achievement, or
devotion to the family.
Inequalities in power
In the United States and Europe, natives under-
stand their own gender relations to offer more
opportunity for female emancipation, a belief
that typically casts immigrant men as hyper-
masculine or exploitative patriarchs while also
rendering invisible the gender inequalities of
the host society. With such assumptions, native
women often seek to “rescue” or to “protect”
foreign-born women from the men of their
own families and communities. Immigrants,
by contrast, sometimes view modern cultures
as immoral in their sexual freedoms, destruc-
tively individualistic or materialist and hostile
to family solidarity. The behavior of immigrant
daughters easily becomes symbolic of relative
losses and gains in such cultural battles.
Historically, receiving nations have also
offered very different options to men and
women as citizens. Many nations, down to
the present, provide only limited options for
immigrants to change their citizenship through
naturalization. But for those who have, up to
the 20th century, it was frequently the case that
the citizenship or nationality of wives and
children followed that of their husbands and
fathers. Even in our own times the citizenship
status assigned to children born to foreign men
and women in international marriages may

differ. Gendered access to citizenship, too,
tends to portray women as more culturally
conservative and oriented toward their home-
lands, than men. Yet many studies also reveal
that men are more eager to contemplate return
to their countries of origin than women and in
most countries, naturalization rates do not
differ significantly by gender.
SEE ALSO: Asia, gender and migration;
Caribbean: gender and migration; Europe: gender
and migration; Gender, labor, and migration;
United States: gender and migration
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