Gender Ratios in Global Migration: Men who Migrate, Women who Wait?
This resource uses a text and graft to show how the gender ratio of international migrants--the proportion of male to female migrants--has changed over time. Its goal is to stimulate thinking about shifting gender ratios in global migration and to consider how migration affects men and women differently.
Introduction
Scholars of migration note how men and women experience the migration process differently. Gender—culturally constructed ideas of what it means to be female and male—has shaped how, when, and where men and women move across national borders and within nation-states. In the late nineteenth century geographer E.G. Ravenstein used 1871 census data from the United Kingdom to posit a number of “laws of migration" that attempted to explain human mobility. One of these laws concluded that while women were more migratory than men overall, the distances women traveled remained short; long-distance migration, Ravenstein argued, was preserved primarily for men. While men have tended to predominate long-distance migration from certain sending countries, new trends since the 1960s reveal many more women traveling longer distances. The shifting gender ratio in migration patterns is affected by various factors, including large scale economic changes, new labor demands, communication and technological innovations, modifications of national migration laws, and changing ideas about womanhood and manhood. Since the 1960s in particular, the “femininization" of international migration has prompted scholars to ask more probing questions about variations in gender ratios in migration patterns: Why do some countries send men, while others send women? Which countries send women and which countries send men? How have these numbers change over time?
The following resources explore how gender ratios in global migration change over time. The first document is an excerpt from E.G. Ravenstein’s 1885 “The Laws of Migration," in which he describes female migration in the United Kingdom. The second source is a graph depicting shifts in women’s presence among immigrants in a total of 20 nations. This data is drawn from individual-level census data from the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS-USA and IPUMS-International) and the North Atlantic Population Project at the Minnesota Population Center, University of Minnesota.
Primary Sources
Source One:
Exerpts for classroom use.
Citation: Ravenstein, E.G. “The Laws of Migration." Journal of the Statistical Society of London. Vol 48, N. 2 (June, 1885): 196-199.
Source Two:
Citation:: Alexander, Trent J., Katharine M. Donato, Donna R. Gabaccia, and Johanna Leinonen. “Women’s representation among the foreign-born in 20 countries." Data from the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series films (IPUMS-USA and IPUMS-International), North Atlantic Population Project (NAAP). Reprinted here with authors' permissions.
Discussion Questions
(1) What does Ravenstein argue about the differences between male and female migration patterns in the United Kingdom during the late nineteenth century? How does he explain variations among gender ratios in different countries?
(2) What long-term trends related to changes in the proportion of women international migrants can you identify from the IPUMS graph? Which countries have the most women migrants?
(3) How does the graph both challenge and support some of Ravenstein’s conclusions about gender and migration in the late 1800s? Hypothesize about some of factors that might explain the “feminization" of international migration.
Suggested Readings
Tobler, Waldo. "Migration: Ravenstein, Thorntwaite, and Beyond." Urban Geography. Vol. 16, No. 4 (1995), 327-343.
Donato, Katherine. “Understanding U.S. Immigration: Why Some Countries Send Women and Others Send Men." In Seeking Common Ground: Multidisciplinary Studies of Immigrant Women in the United States, edited by Donna Gabaccia. New York: Greenwood Press, 1992.
Oishi, Nana . Women in Motion: Globalization, State Policies and Labor Migration in Asia. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005.
Gabaccia, Donna, Katherine Donato, Jennifer Holdaway, Martin Manalansan, and Patricia Pessar, eds. International Migration Review. Special issue on “Gender and Migration." Vol. 40, Spring 2006.