Cutting edge pack: gender and migration

How does migration advance or impede gender equality? How can policy-makers and practitioners promote gender equality in work on migration? This report seeks to answer these questions by looking at both internal and international migration, regular and irregular migration, as well as across the spectrum from forced, such as trafficking, to voluntary migration. It explores the gendered patterns of migration, including how gender impacts on decisions to migrate in terms of who goes and why, and in turn how this affects the benefits and risks of migration for women and men, including impact on gender relations. How levels of development may influence migration decisions and the consequent impact are explored from a gender perspective, including a review of remittances, “brain drain” and HIV/AIDS.

The authors call for a gender-sensitive rights-based approach to migration that also recognises the development potential of migration. The key elements of such an approach could be:

• immigration and emigration policies that enable women as well as men to take up opportunities that safe and regular migration may offer
• mobilise around and support for international rights frameworks that offer protection for women migrants to ensure that governments ratify and adhere to such
• support for the acknowledgement and realisation of the rights of migrants throughout the migration process.