Female Migration: A Conceptual Framework

Gender-related differences in migration are clearly evident. A need for specific analysis of female migration exists. Recent research provides preliminary evidence of the steadily expanding stream of female migration both the associational migration of wives accompanying migrant spouses and the autonomous migration of unattached women. A problem of analyzing female migration is the difficulty of identifying female migration that is independent of household or family migration. This chapter proposes a gender-specific framework to redress the male bias in approaches to migration and to analyze the specific causes of female migration with a view to assessing the significance of gender in migration. By focusing on income and employment opportunities in the urban labor market as well as the role of the urban marriage market and the special institutional cultural and political constraints on womens migration this framework can serve as the basis for organizing empirical research on female migration in developing countries. Females now predominate in the migration streams throughout Latin America and parts of Asia. They also represent a growing proportion of internal migrants in Africa. The migration of women like that of men is job-oriented; employment opportunities and wage differentials actual or perceived between rural and urban areas are of central significance. A distinguishing feature however is the importance of marriage as a reason for migration. Marriage could be an unavoidable correlate of migration. The autonomous migration of women may be found only where values supporting or at least sanctioning their mobility prevail. Key variables in the proposed model are: the differential between expected urban income and average rural income; the mobility-marriage factor expressed in terms of marriage probabilities to males either engaged in or actively seeking work; differential reflecting the relative probabilities of marriage to any eligible urban male; the strength of sex-role constraints on any kind of spatial mobility for women from particular areas of origin; and all other residual factors such as distance that might modify the pace and direction of female migration.