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The review of theories of gender and migration in the West will focus on the past two decades of writing in Europe and North America (Canada and the US) with some reference to Australasia. The intellectual circulation of ideas and the focus on gendered migration from the global South, often from Asian countries, to the North mean that the division between Europe, North America and Asia cannot be seen as representing bounded regions or addressing totally distinct themes. The global has become the scale at which labor migrations, especially domestic work and care, have been conceptualized (Lutz 2011; Mahon and Robinson 2011; Zimmerman et al. 2006), although local and regional variants need to be recognized (Raghuram 2012).

For the period from the 1990s which I shall primarily be discussing, much of the literature has focused on labor and family migrations and the experiences of settlement within transnational and global contexts. While there is a substantial literature on gender and refugees, it has increasingly tended to be studied by specialist scholars. In the 1990s, following the breakup of nation-states and as a result of conflicts in neighboring regions, asylum seekers and refugees constituted a large group of migrants in Europe and were included in an overall analysis of migration, for example as in Lydia Morris’ (2002) concept of civic stratification, analyzed in terms of stratified rights of entry, residence, access to the labor market and welfare.Footnote 1 So too in the various chapters of New Perspectives on Gender and Migration (Piper 2008) did the examination of different livelihoods and stratified entitlements that cover all categories of migrants. The nature of gender persecution, women as a social group and the asylum determination process are some of the current lively debates in relation to asylum and refugees (Bhabha 1996; Crawley 2001, 2006; Freedman 2003). Of course, many of the refugee communities from the 1980s and 1990s, whether from Central America in North America, or Turkey, the Middle East and Africa in Europe, have become ordinary migrant communities and absorbed into the literature on incorporation and integration as well as transnationalism. And during the past two decades, labor flows, irregular and official, have grown, while family migration, the largest contributor to permanent migration and a heavily female flow, has been problematized by states.

Even without including asylum and refugee aspects, the field of gender and migration is extensive. In this paper, my focus will be on how theorizing gender in migration has engaged with two perspectives framing contemporary migrations, that of transnationalism and globalization. Each of them emerged in a particular disciplinary, regional and socio-political context. Transnationalism emerged initially in the United States from anthropological research which critiqued an assimilationist paradigm and the nation-state as a taken for granted unit of analysis. Hence, it sought to reformulate the way one saw society by highlighting attachments between places of destination and origin and border crossings (Levitt and Glick Schiller 2004). Subsequently other variants were adopted. The field of studies was broadened to include a range of different types of connections between places (Transnational Community Programme at Oxford University). Transnational families (Bryceson and Vuorela 2002), particularly strong in European research, developed, especially in relation to caring functions of the elderly (Baldasser and Baldock 2000; Baldassar 2007) and children left behind. Another focus has been on transnational social spaces (Faist 2010) through kinship groups, transnational circuits and transnational communities whose solidarity is based on their shared identity. These approaches, however, omit more circulatory movements based on savoir-circuler (knowledge of how to circulate) which is not premised on settlement in another country but where individuals migrate so as to stay at home (Morokvasic 2004). As King (2012) puts it, the transnational perspective has teased out the “transnational tensions” of “stability within movement.” In addition, some have adopted a more critical transnationalism seeking to place it within a ‘systematically divided and historically produced global world’ (Espiritu 2005) and thereby connecting with the critical analysis of globalization.

Globalization, as a connected world of flows of communication, capital, goods and services and people, and with profound transformations upon places and groups, has gone through a number of phases and interpretations of historical antecedents, spatialities and its privileged and marginalized subjects. In the 1990s, neo-liberal and hyper versions of globalization of disembodied flows, deterritorialization, loss of state sovereignty and global elites were prominent, e.g. Castells (1996). Since then, a more sophisticated understanding of the complex interplay of de- and re-nationalization has replaced the simple loss of state power (Sassen 2006) as well as making visible its gendered counter geographies (Sassen 2000). Its disciplinary associations are primarily with geography, sociology and international relations, especially political economy approaches. Though slightly prior to the burgeoning studies of globalization, Cynthia Enloe (1989) in Bananas, Beaches and Bases, tracked the implications of diverse circulations of women and men arising from international politics, such as sex tourism, prostitution in areas around military bases, diplomatic wives, and nannies, au pairs and domestic workers. In the latter case, many of them are recent immigrants hired by middle class women who have entered the labor force. As she rightly noted, the employment of domestic workers was not limited to the First World. Later writing theorized how gender can be incorporated into thinking about global processes and inequalities and the concrete sites of global transformations, such as the state, cities and households, and the strategies and responses to global restructurings (Marchand and Sisson Runyan 2000). It took however a few years for gender, migration and globalization to be brought together.

In the next section, I will first trace briefly the emergence of research on women and then gender and migration. This will be followed by exploring how gender has engaged with transnationalism and globalization and with feminist concepts of gender order and intersectionality, and concluding with how gender and migration studies have contributed to these perspectives. The scope of the paper is on research conducted in Europe and North America. However, within these broad regions, there are notable differences. For example, much Canadian research is strongly influenced by political economy and global approaches while research in the USA is more focused on the socio-cultural and transnational.

6.1 From Women to Gender and Theoretical Engagements

Until the late 1970s, women had consistently been ignored and, when mentioned, were most frequently associated with family migration and family life; they were not seen as economic actors (Zlotnik 1995) or relevant to important issues of employment, housing and discrimination (Morokvasic 1975). In some instances, they were mentioned briefly, only to be subsequently omitted from the analysis which their inclusion complicated (Berger and Mohr 1975; Portes and Bach 1985). By the 1980s, women had become an object of enquiry in studies of migration in a number of European countries, Canada and the United States.

Thus, the early 1980s resulted in a series of overviews of women and migration, largely dominated by labor migration and a political economy perspective (Morokvasic 1984; Phizacklea 1983). In the following years, other forms of migration, such as that involving refugees, came to be included (Simon and Brettell 1986) as well as an attempt to understand how personal and family networks mediated and operated to facilitate and sustain migration (Boyd 1989). Castles and Miller’s (1993, pp. 8–9) The Age of Migration was the first text to incorporate women in its fourth tendency consisting of the feminization of migration which was traced back to the growing role of women in labor migration in Europe, the Middle East and Japan. For them, it “raises new issues both for policymakers and for those who study the migratory process.” In many of the periodizations of the gender and migration literature, the 1990s represented a shift toward a focus on gender relations and a heightened awareness of the interlocking character between social characteristics and the fluidity of gender relations (Hondagneu-Sotelo 2003; Lutz 2010). For Lutz (2010, p. 1549), it meant the “social construction of masculinity and femininity, the differential meaning of private and public as a workplace, the gender-specific evaluation and the differential consequences of migration experiences for male and female migrants in the context of being couples, parents and families.” Yet, although a number of leading American scholars of gender and migration have castigated othersFootnote 2 for maintaining a focus on women, many studies still focus on women without constantly comparing them with men. Migrant men and masculinities remain a relatively limited object of enquiry (but see Datta et al. 2008; Donaldson et al. 2009; Kilkey 2010; Scrinzi 2010).

The years from the end of the 1990s to 2003 constituted a watershed. On the one hand, a series of books reviewed, presented a state of the art and summed up our understanding of gender and migration globally (Willis and Yeoh 2000) and regionally, for Europe (Kofman et al. 2000) and the United States (Hondagneu-Sotelo 2003). Feminist scholars had also sought to engender mainstream theories such as transnationalism and globalization. On the other hand, several articles and books set out analyses which have dominated or set the framework for concerns about gender and migration for the following decade. In particular, the first was the concept of global chains of care formulated by Arlie Hochschild (2000) and based on the fieldwork of Parrenas (2001, 2009) who had named the transfer of domestic and care labor from the Global South to the Global North as the international division of reproductive labor. The second, on transnational familiesFootnote 3 (Bryceson and Vuorela 2002) built on the existing literature on transnationalism and applied it specifically to translocal or multi-sited families. They defined them as ‘families that live some or most of the time separated from each other, yet hold together and create something that can be seen as a feeling of collective welfare and unity, namely “familyhood” even across national borders’ (p. 3). At the time of my review of family migration literature in Europe, this perspective was only beginning to take off in Europe unlike the situation in the Asia Pacific (Kofman 2004b).

At the end of the 1990s, Katie Willis and Brenda Yeoh (2000, p. xi) commented that analysis had become more engaged with theoretical constructs and the diversity of categories among women and men such that gender cuts across class, ethnicity, sexuality and age. Others (Hondagneu-Sotelo 2003; Kofman 1999) felt, however, that while there had been an accumulation of empirical studies, there had been little real shift in mainstream social science research on migration in taking heed of gender identities and relations. Mahler and Pessar (2006, p. 28) concur and suggest that this happens in part due to the undervaluation of the qualitative data that largely inform gender analyses.

Increasingly, analyses of gender and migration sought to engage with integrative theories connecting places and processes (Kofman 2004a), such as transnationalism (Hondganeu-Sotelo and Avila 1997; Mahler 2003) and globalization through its alternative circuits (Sassen 2000) and social reproduction (Truong 1996). These authors argued that the theory they were engaging with was short on gender but useful in advancing our understanding of gender and migration.

Transnationalism has had considerable appeal (Truong and Gasper 2008) for those wishing to transcend the dichotomies imposed by the constraints of the nation-state and embrace the breadth of material and symbolic goods, practices and mobile subjects within social fields of migrant circulation, i.e., their communities and the connections between them which are influenced by multiple sets of laws and institutions (Levitt and Glick Schiller 2004). This perspective brings out the diversity and complexity of migratory movements in an historical context, the gender transformations and new identities as well as legal systems. Yet at the outset, gender relations were marginalized, hence some feminist scholars (Mahler and Pessar 2001; Pessar 2003; Pessar and Mahler 2003; Mahler and Pessar 2006) directed their efforts to engendering it. Their interest lay in whether gender relations were reproduced or transformed in the context of transnationalism.

In engendering transnationalism, Mahler and Pessar (2001) and Pessar and Mahler (2003) developed a framework they called ‘gendered geographies of power’ which consisted of three elements: (1) Geographical scales where gender operates across multiple scales from the body, the family, the state, and in which it is embedded and re-enacted between these different scales. What happens when one crosses borders, i.e., does this reinforce gender ideologies or allow them to change? (2) Social location refers to how individuals are located in multiple and intersecting hierarchies of gender, race, class, and sexuality.Footnote 4 These locations may be fluid in that one can occupy a high location in one place while occupying a lower one elsewhere, that is positioned in contradictory locations (Anthias 2013). Migrant women encounter downward social mobility through deskilling in the country of immigration but this may be experienced differently according to their previous situation or social location—downward mobility being higher for an educated person. Quite a few studies have commented on men wanting to return to their home country where they have a higher social location and their domination of home town associations (Goldring 2001). (3) The agency people have over their social location. This refers to the notion that some people are able to initiate movement and partake in mobility and was derived from Doreen Massey (1993). However, while Massey’s analysis is firmly placed within global spaces of inequality, the economic aspect is often pushed into the background in transnational perspectives. Indeed, Bürkner (2012, p. 190) contends that social inequality, mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion, and political regulations have not received adequate analytical attention.

For Truong and Gasper (2008), embedding gender in migration studies enables the intersection between (1) gender as a reality that permeates social lives, (2) labor as a human creativity mediated and affected by technological changes, and (3) migration as a gendered history of human connections, often set in family and kinship systems, social identities and production relations. The analysis of multi-local livelihoods allows for a better understanding of the dynamics of migration, the roles of social networks and actors, intra-household level interaction and the role of remittances. They caution against the insufficiency of purely economic perspectives while arguing that migration studies need to return to a more culturally aware political economy but also reflecting the value of transnational perspectives. I will return subsequently to Truong’s (1996) earlier path breaking work on gender, international migration and social reproduction.

Annie Phizacklea (2000) too embraced trans-nationalism as a way forward beyond the old dichotomy of the individual versus the structural. She considered that this concept could more successfully articulate the connections between levels using the theory of structuration to introduce the institutional meso level based on a framework put forward by Goss and Lindquist (1995). They had argued that the highly organized labor migration from the Philippines could only be understood through the operation of national and international institutions linking employers and individuals across time and space, while households and social networks are chaotic and imprecisely used concepts, and are therefore inadequate as the sole elements of meso-level analysis. For Phizacklea (1983), while households are crucial, they only form one piece of the jigsaw puzzle. So too should one question the ability of networks to articulate structure and agency. Hence, we need to think in terms of an institutional complex encompassing knowledgeable individuals, the agents of organizations (migrant associations and multinational corporations), kinship networks and the state. Where migratory flows are less institutionalized, Phizacklea suggests turning to Massey et al. (1993), who argue that as countries have become more restrictive, a lucrative niche opens up for entrepreneurs who facilitate the crossing of borders.Footnote 5 The role of employers and recruitment agencies and those who facilitated the movement of migrants (smuggling and trafficking) were highly relevant in advancing our understanding of gendered European migrations (Kofman et al. 2000).

However, for both households and networks, it was felt that more sophisticated research was needed on the diversity of households and how they are changed through migration in both sending and receiving societies. Others (Truong and Gasper 2008) highlighted the centrality of networks and affiliations and suggested that they play different roles in different stages of migration as well as for different categories of migrants, for example, the skilled and less skilled. Equally, there has been considerable reflection on networks and how they contribute to the formation of social capital (Erel 2010; Ryan et al. 2008).

Despite the popularity of a transnational perspective, we should not downplay the significance of global inequalities in providing a focus for an understanding of gendered migrations. Phizacklea had rejected globalization as a theoretical framework on the grounds that it tended to highlight the workings of transnational companies, transportation systems and information and communications technologies in altering the space-time dimension of our lives but had underplayed the continuing significance of national identities and belonging. Hence, the hyphen in trans-nationalism. While this was common in many theories of globalization in the 1990s, global inequalities needed to be addressed and with much of the gender and globalization highlighted. Sassen-Koob (1984), Sassen (2000, 2002), for example, focused on growing inequalities in the global economy and the feminization of survival. She had started by making connections between de-industrialization in the US and internal migration in Third World countries as the US shifted its low level manufacturing there. This led to analyses of the strategic sites of globalization, namely global cities, which acted as magnets for low paid labor to serve the growing number of high paid elites. She argued that we are witnessing the return of the servant classes, largely composed of migrant women and men in both shadow and formal activities (domestic work, industrial cleaning, fast foods). In countries of origin, women have become crucial in the circuits of counter geographies (domestic work, sex work, nursing), and through their remittances ensure the survival of their families and national economies. Rather than being a burden, such low income individuals have become significant sources for profit and government revenue enhancement.

Truong (1996) drew attention to the close relationship between production and reproduction or its intimate ‘Other’ through the globalized transfer of labor. A global rather than a national perspective was necessary to understand the transfer of labor from one class, ethnic group or nation. It was explained by three elements: (1) Structural gaps in the reproduction of labor which affected different classes and economies; (2) the processes by which the transfer occurred; and (3) the implications of this for states, capital, communities and reproductive workers themselves. The current gaps arose from the withdrawal of the state from supporting children and the elderly; the increased participation in paid work by women and the inflexibility of the sexual division of work in the household, and the expansion of hospitality and tourist industries giving rise to associated sex industries. These were the same reasons offered by Ehrenreich and Hochschild (2003) in their book Global Woman for the care crisis in the developed world.

6.2 Continuities, Discontinuities and New Directions

Ehrenreich and Hochschild (2003) had commented that ‘the migration of women from the ‘Third World’ to do women’s work in affluent countries had so far received little scholarly or media attention’. Parreñas (2001) extended Truong’s notion of reproductive labor with the concept of the ‘international division of reproductive labor’ but it was Hochschild (2000), using Parreñas fieldwork of Filipina women in Italy and the US to describe the global connections and transfers of labor, who coined the term ‘global chains of care.’ Global chains of care were defined as ‘a series of personal links between people across the globe, based on the paid or unpaid work of caring’. The chain serves to abstract labor (physical and emotional) upwards. These chains in turn cascade downwards and incorporate labor that at each stage is remunerated to a lesser extent, as does the commodity chain. Women’s migration reconstitutes the division of labor among women themselves with other female kin absorbing some of the caring activities.

The concept rapidly became very influential as a theorization of transfers of care globally but, as a number of critiques have commented, it is premised on a very narrow range of relationships, institutional arrangements and care regimes (Kofman 2010; Manalansan 2006; Yeates 2009). Firstly, the chain was embodied in transnational motherhood of women who had left their children behind. “The global care chain concept suffers from its lack of embeddedness in a critical international political economy perspective and from its narrow application to just one group of migrant care workers” (Yeates 2004, p. 370). For Hondagneu-Sotelo and Avila (1997), who had drawn attention to this group in their study of Latin American women in Southern California, the category of transnational mothers leaving their children behind was not the dominant one, tending unsurprisingly to be most common among live-in-domestic workers. Among live-out housekeepers and carers and weekly cleaners, this category constituted the minority. Indeed, Parreñas’ sample of 222 women in Rome comprised about half single women as well as 79 men. In this general representation, the transfer of care labor becomes totally identified with transnational motherhood and a care deficit for children left behind. Another study of domestic workers in Italy revealed that 41.6 % were married but 69.6 % had migrated alone (Chaloff 2005). Although Parreñas’ sample was not a small one, many studies of domestic work and care are based on small samples, often capturing only a subset of the migrant labor force (Williams 2011), whether it be in terms of marital status, dependents, nationality or immigration status.

Manalansan (2006, p. 239) suggests that we complicate the analysis by firstly examining the presence of men which he argues would highlight the continuities and discontinuities of domestic work (Scrinzi 2010). Indeed, migrant men are much more likely to undertake care work than non-migrant men and are particularly prominent in care for the elderly. He has also critiqued the heteronormative assumptions and failure to see women and men as sexual and gendered agents. Lastly, family dynamics and migration are more extensive than child care, transnational motherhood and children left behind implied in the care chains literature.

Older people, both as care receivers and care-givers, also have their place. Although it is difficult for older migrants—generally those over 50 years—to migrate independently, they may be able to do so through family reunification, especially in countries such as Australia, Canada and the USA (Thang et al. 2012). For Latin Americans in Spain, of whom an increasing number have residence rights or citizenship, this has meant that they are able to bring in parents, who may enable the daughter to continue working, often as a carer herself. Grandmothers also constitute a resource. In certain instances, ‘swallow grandmothers’ move from their country of origin to the country of their daughters’ settlement. These transnational daughters are not necessarily transnational mothers (Escriva 2005). Ecsrivà takes into account immigration policy (see below) in shaping family dynamics and formation. The ability and right to bring in family members, even for those who are legally resident, are not necessarily available to recent migrants in all European countries, especially for those working in the domestic and other less skilled sectors. Even where formal family migration policies exist, the right to bring in parents is discretionary.

As with the new economics of labor migration approach, one of the strengths of the care chains approach is that it has highlighted the role of the household in the global economy but it has treated the transfer of labor as if it flowed directly between households or at best, with the aid of networks. Instead, the household is one of the nodes of what has been called the care or welfare diamond (Jenson 2003; Kofman and Raghuram 2010; Razavi 2007), connecting different institutions and sites in the provision of care. In addition to the household, the other points are the state (national, regional and local), markets and communities (non- profit and voluntary). The strength of each of the points and the relationship between them vary according to welfare regimes (Lyon and Glucksmann 2008). Indeed, it has been the ultra-liberal regimes such as the United States and familial welfare regimes (Lutz 2008), where public care services are poorly provided, upon which the research for the care chains has been based. In many European states, despite increasing marketization of care, it is provided through a combination of the state, the market and the voluntary sector, and in each of these nodes, migrants contribute to the labor force. Many migrants also work in residential homes for the elderly, which are largely run by the private sector (Cangiano et al. 2009). Shortages in care labor have increasingly been filled in many states by EU migrants who have the right to work and access to welfare services and benefits. Indeed in the UK, the care work force is highly varied in terms of immigration status. Among the foreign born in 2007–2008, UK citizens comprised 28 % EU nationals 20 % those with permanent residence 14 % with work permits 19 % students nine percent, spouses seven percent and other visa categories two percent (Cangiano et al. 2009, p. 67).

More recently, a framework based on a transnational political economy of care has been developed. Fiona Williams (2011) proposes five dimensions—the transnational movement of care labor, transnational dynamics of care commitments, transnational movement of care capital, transnational influence of care discourses and policies, and the development of transnational social movements, NGOs and grassroots organizations. Let me focus on the first two which directly impact on migration, although the other dimensions also shape the global care landscape. In the first dimension, Williams recognizes not only the diversity of contracts and working conditions among home care workers but also that in some states, such as the UK, formal care and health workers are numerically far more important than home-based ones. Secondly, in relation to the second dimension, migrants leave behind commitments but they also activate further migration for care.

There are four ways of thinking about the relationship between care and migration but in practice, a mix of all four may occur in any context (Kofman and Raghuram, 2010):

  1. 1.

    people who migrate as care providers

  2. 2.

    people who migrate and leave some care responsibilities behind

  3. 3.

    people who migrate and bring some care responsibilities with them

  4. 4.

    people who migrate and have either daily or emergency care requirements, particularly as they get older.

Most current analysis has focused on the first two categories (Lutz 2010). The first type of mobility, i.e., of those who move to care, is increasing, as we have shown. The second type, of the issue of the care of the left-behind, has a long history. It involves both children and elderly (Diaz Gorfinkel and Escrivà 2012). In relation to those who bring care responsibilities with them, our third category, normative notions of family mean that migrants are sometimes allowed to bring younger dependent children with them but rarely are elderly relatives, such as parents allowed, except as visitors (Kofman and Meetoo 2008). The care needs of migrants, especially as migrants age, are the least well considered of our four categories.

The transnational political economy framework developed by Willams (2011) sets migration within a broader context and recognizes the diversity of flows, conditions of employment and the fact that care also yields profits for small and big business through its provision of labor for and beyond the household. What appears to be missing is the role of the state and its entry and settlement regulations. Its role in producing supply and demand for caring labor must be taken into account rather than assuming that it is the market that transfers labor between transnationally distant households. States such as the Philippines, produce professions that can be exported, such as nurses, and encourage emigration (Magalit Rodriguez 2010). Others may prevent certain categories, such as less skilled women and especially those with young children, from legally emigrating.

Immigration regulations structure labor supply through selective policies (Harzig 2003; Kofman 2012b). This generates a complex system of stratification of class, gender and race based on the interaction of skills, mode of entry and nationality, in which the global competition for the skilled has made them increasingly welcome as migrants who have the possibility of acquiring citizenship. Care work generally does not qualify as skilled work. In Canada, the Live-In Caregiver scheme, with a predominance of Filipino women, was designed as a temporary worker route tying migrants to employers and deskilling them for the first two years (Stasilius and Bakan 2003; Pratt 2012), though it has effectively become an immigration route. In Europe, most states, except Italy and Spain, do not recognize domestic labor as a valuable form of work which warrants a work permit. The way in which different states in the EU opened up to migrants from Eastern Europe also shaped the status of migrants who might have right of residence but not the right to work unless self-employed or placed by an agency in the country of origin. This was the situation of Polish workers in Germany during the transitionary period from 2004 until the country opened up fully in 2011 (Lutz and Palenga-Möllenbeck 2012). In some European states, for example in Denmark and Norway (Stenum 2010), the absence of a channel for domestic workers has been circumvented by the use of au pairs increasingly drawn worldwide.

Capturing the range of activities that constitute the international division of reproductive labor (Parreñas 2012) has led to a return to the earlier concept of social reproduction (Bakker and Silvey 2008; Kofman 2012a) linked to a renewed interest in gendered political economy, especially in its interest in how everyday actions transform the global economy (Hobson and Seabrooke 2008; Piper 2011). Social reproduction may be defined as all those activities that are undertaken to maintain and sustain individuals, families and communities in their everyday lives. It enables one to connect both relational or face-to-face activities, such as physical care with the non-relational, such as cleaning (industrial and home) or food preparation (Duffy 2005) which also employ large numbers of migrant workers. It also encompasses a variety of institutional settings and skill levels which are assigned to different categories of workers (Bakker and Silvey 2008). Furthermore, the migrants who contribute to reproductive labor are not necessarily entering through labor routes. Those with hybrid identities, such as student-workers, as well as the large number of family migrants employed in paid (and unpaid) domestic work and care (Kofman 2012a), also contribute to reproductive labor.

At the same time, the focus of much research on migrant women continues to leave largely invisible those who do not work in the domestic and care sectors (Morokvasic 2012; Kofman 2013). Migrants also work in many countries in the more skilled sectors of nursing and social work, that is, the caring professions (Gabriel 2011; Widding Isaksen 2010; Kingma 2006; Yeates 2009). Yet reviews of gender and migration often omit this category altogether (Lutz 2010), although the gender brain drain, especially of health workers, has become a major policy concern in migration and development (Piper 2011). My article (Kofman 2000) examined the reasons for the invisibility of skilled female migrants in studies of skilled migration in Europe but the topic continues to attract relatively little attention (but see Ackers 2004; Boucher 2007, 2009; Iredale 2005; Jungwirth 2011; Kofman 2012b; Kofman and Raghuram 2005; 2006; Meares 2010; Riano 2011),Footnote 6 leaving the literature on skilled migration male-dominated and focused on the workplace and its economic dimension.

There seems to be a paradigmatic separation (Kofman and Raghuram 2005) between the skilled and the unskilled such that globalization for migrant women has been driven by the circulation of those undertaking less skilled work (Sassen 2000) in order to ensure the survival of households and states. In contrast, much of the literature on skilled migration pays attention to the contribution of migrants in the knowledge economy, and in particular the science, information technology, financial and managerial sectors, which are seen to be the driving forces behind global wealth creation. These occupations are the most valued in monetary terms and are consequently often also designated as highly skilled, rather than just ordinarily skilled, such as teaching, and therefore increasingly privileged in immigration policies in many European states.

Skilled migration tends to be treated as purely economic in which social considerations do not impact. As Helma Lutz (2010, p. 1659) concluded, “a closer look at economic theories of migration from a gendered perspective promises to show a multiplicity of motives other than purely economic ones for pursuing or refraining from migration projects.” Filipina nurses, for example, cited both economic and social reasons of desiring greater independence from prevailing gender norms and a wish to see the world, compared to men whose reasons were more concerned with economic power (Espiritu 2005). Furthermore, skilled female migrants tend to be concentrated in female-dominated occupations, such as education, health and social work. Much of the research in these areas tends to be undertaken by disciplines such as human resources (Hussein et al. 2011) or industrial relations (Bach 2010) where issues concerning the workplace are paramount and treated separately from the familial and social dimensions.

Another concern in the past few years, both in the US and in Europe, has been the extent of social change, especially in relation to the emancipation and empowerment of women and changes in gender ideologies and relations as women, and in few instances men (Donaldson et al. 2009), move to a new society.Footnote 7 Morokvasic (2007) counseled against accepting uncritically the idea that the move from a traditional to a modern society results in emancipation or that participation in the labor market translates into changing and more egalitarian gender relations in the home and the community. She notes that many studies point to the contrary that is, the reproduction of gender inequalities, intensified traditional roles, dependency and increased work load. However, she also nuances the negative outcomes in arguing that the gender order, though not challenged and overturned, may be used to one’s advantage, for example, using marriage to be able to migrate or obtain residence in a country. And in relation to a group of health professionals, unlike the less skilled who are usually the subject of discussion, Espiritu (2005) highlights the fact that gender asymmetries may persist even if certain gender inequalities are altered. The reasons men and women have for migrating also differed; for men, it was for economic improvement and to be desirable sexual partners, for women, in addition to economic considerations, it was also to liberate themselves from sexual constraints and make more independent choices about marriage partners. Many of the men had migrated as dependents of their wives and had experienced downward social mobility while women had done well in the labor market. A gain in gender equality may be uneven for professionals so that while men may do more childcare, women still do most of the household tasks. Thus, the change in social location is not just an overall change in gender relations but one which should be evaluated in relation to different domains, such as the work and home, as well as in terms of social divisions such as class, ethnicity and gender (Anthias 2008) in both the receiving and sending country (Lutz 2010).Footnote 8

The concept of gender order, used by German feminist scholars (Jungwirth 2011; Lenz et al. 2007), and based on Connell (1987), can be useful in developing a more systematic and comparative framework for the analysis of migration from one society to another. Gender order refers to an inventory of historical patterns of power relations between men and women and definitions of femininity and masculinity. It encompasses different institutions, such as work, family, education and the state, and I would add, the immigration system. Each of these institutional sites has its own gender regime. Globally, gender orders have become unbound (Lenz et al. 2007) as women have taken up employment in the formal sector and the male breadwinner model has declined, yet men are still reluctant to undertake household tasks. Though more flexible and varied, and affected by neo-liberalism and a market philosophy, gender orders are still embedded in national and regional institutions and structures, and also differ between women and between men by class, nationality, age, religion and sexuality.

We should not assume, however, any linear movement between supposedly less wealthy and higher income societies in relation to the gender order experienced by women. Female migrants from post-socialist societies have encountered in Germany a society in which science and technology is a profoundly male domain, unlike in their countries of origin, and if employed, they are therefore channeled into lower paying female occupations. Conservative welfare regimes in Europe, such as Austria, Germany and Switzerland, are still largely based on a male breadwinner model. In cases where they have entered as family migrants, and therefore assumed to be divorced from the world of work, the normative gender order, both in the workplace and through immigration regulations (restricting access to the labor market), forces women into profoundly traditional roles (see Riano 2011 for Switzerland) which are often ascribed to the ‘traditional cultures’ of their countries of origin.

The gender order may have become more flexible for national women and men but it has usually been retained in all its traditional trappings for migrants. We see this most clearly in the necessity for migrants to marry to enter as spouses rather than cohabit, a common form of relationship in the states under discussion in this paper. Although transnational families have now been on the agenda for a decade (Bryceson and Vuorela 2002; Zontini 2010), family and marriage migrations have in recent years received increasing attention as many European states have problematized the integration of family members and as a result, imposed integration at the border through more restrictive admissions criteria (Kofman et al. 2013; Kraler et al. 2011; Olwig 2011).

6.3 Conclusion

Engendering transnationalism, globalization and migration has added new dimensions and ways of perceiving how these concepts can further our understanding of everyday lives, social practices and complex inequalities resulting from migratory movements of women and men. While there is a growing interest in social change and transformation, the role of shifting gender orders has not been adequately recognized by mainstream scholars. These changes in gender orders are varied and complex between societies. As we have noted, there are diverse migratory pathways not only between the most commonly studied South and North but also between North-North and South-South.

Furthermore, moving between societies and states embraces many types of temporalities and social locations across different sites of work, family and community. There has been a tendency to construct dichotomies and separations but as I have argued in this chapter, it would be helpful to articulate the categories and sites. For example, labor and family migrations are connected and influence each other.

So too should we consider how the two approaches of transnationalism and globalization, and developments within each, increasingly engage with each other. More and more, the two are being combined theoretically and methodologically. Within transnational perspectives, the institutional has been taken more seriously; for globalization, the relationship between everyday lives and sites of social reproduction and global processes has come to the fore. And between the everyday and the global, we should not forget the state as an institution which has increasingly intervened, not just in the management of migration and designating ever more complex systems of stratification, but also in the management of integration and transnational movements, especially in relation to families who are often deemed not to be sufficiently modern. These interventions all have an impact on gendered migrations.