The International Migration of Women

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.