Gender Rights and Global Migration

• In Event: Gender and immigration

Abstract

Abstract:

We map and explain he determinants of global migration; specifically the effect of political rights on migration flows into advanced industrial democracies. While there has been quite a bit of empirical work on migration writ large, little cross-national work has focused on gendered patterns. Historically, women’s migration patterns were linked to the economic choices of male income-generators. Yet rising education levels, the thrust of political conflicts, new global networks of care, and the decline in the male breadwinner household have de-coupled women’s migratory choices from  men’s. Where do women go and why? We advance both the theoretical and empirical literature on gender rights examining the effect of gender rights on the global mobility of women.  We argue that, all else equal, countries with more expansive protections for women will see a higher relative inflows of women as compared with men among their immigrant populations.  By embedding our empirical work within a framework suggested by the canonical gravity model, we mitigate the potential for omitted variables; we are also able to deal with the potential for the endogeneity of political rights as they pertain to women migrants.

Authors

• David Leblang, University of Virginia

• Dawn L. Teele, Johns Hopkins University