The International Migration of Women (Trade and Development)

"As women's roles change and they begin to assume a larger economic role within the family, they increasingly look abroad for sources of livelihood and more competitive wages for their labor. This book is an important first step toward understanding these new trends in migration and how they reflect on the evolving role of women in the global economy."

H. E. Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf,
President of Liberia

"The World Bank Research Program on International Migration and Development has played a leading role in influencing policy makers and development scholars to take a fresh look at the growing and important role of international migration in global development. The International Migration of Women... demonstrates in a number of innovative studies that gender can no longer be thought of as a control variable, but as an important independent factor differentiating both the responsiveness of migration to global processes and the impact of migration within families and on the economies of sending and receiving countries."

Mark Rosenzweig
Frank Altschul Professor of International Economics, Department of Economics
Yale University

The current share of women in the world's international migrant population is close to one half. Despite the great number of female migrants, there has until recently been a striking lack of gender analysis in the economic literature on international migration and development. This volume makes a valuable contribution in this context by providing eight new studies focusing on the nexus between gender, international migration and economic development.
The volume is organized into five parts. Part I sets the stage for the remaining chapters by outlining data on female migration and by reviewing previous research on gender and international migration. Part II explores gendered determinants of migration and remittances and contains two studies. One of them explores the determinants of migration using a unique dataset from rural Mexico. The other study examines gender-specific determinants of remittances using a new dataset collected in major destination countries. Part III addresses the impacts of migration and remittances on sending countries, and provides two analyses of household level data from Ghana and Mexico. Part IV turns to the labor market insertion of female migrants, and explores their labor market participation and performance in the U.S.. The volume concludes with a forward-looking chapter which summarizes the major findings of this volume, links these to policies and outlines some of the burning policy issues that need to be addressed by future research.