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  • IntroductionVariation in the Gender Composition of Migrant Populations
  • Katharine M. Donato (bio)

The articles in this special section examine variation in the gender composition of immigrant populations by using a variety of methodological and analytic techniques and by analyzing different data sources. Although a topic of interest to few scholars in the past, this new work underscores the significance of understanding variation in gender composition among immigrant populations across time and space.

The field of migration and gender studies has shifted considerably since the 1970s, when migration scholars generated women-centered scholarship to fill the void that male-only studies of the past had represented. By the early 1990s the focus of this work shifted to emphasize gender rather than women (Gabaccia et al. 2006; Hondagneu-Sotelo 1999, 2003). As part of this new focus, scholars began to argue that gender was a constitutive element in the migration process (Curran et al. 2006; Hondagneu-Sotelo 2003). Yet despite growth in scholarship on gender and migration, and as José C. Moya aptly notes in his commentary, we still know little about a variety of salient topics, including whether and how variation in the immigration of men and [End Page 191] women exists across time and space. How is this possible? How can knowledge about such essential variation not have appeared before now? As the authors of these articles illustrate, doing this work requires a range of disciplinary lenses, theoretical and methodological approaches, and statistical prowess—attributes that were not explicitly valued and/or available in any one scholar or research team in the past. Shifting to a gendered view challenges us to think explicitly about method, to consider how gender—a social, dynamic, and relative construct—can be measured, and to find existing suitable data that permit a mapping of the variation across time and place.

These authors have taken on these very challenges, and their creative and careful thinking reveals new and provocative findings. The first article, by Donna Gabaccia and Elizabeth Zanoni, examines variation in the gender composition of international migrants from 1820 to 1924. Their analysis uses international entry and exit (flow) data compiled from Willcox and Ferenczi 1970 [1929] for more than three dozen nations and territories—areas of both emigration and immigration—worldwide. Gabaccia and Zanoni find substantial variation in migrant gender ratios at the national, regional, and global levels, suggesting that describing all as male-dominated flows is problematic. They also find that the gendering of immigration in the United States was somewhat different from that of the rest of the world, which experienced convergence toward gender balance in the first half of the twentieth century rather than, as in the US case, since the 1930s. Ultimately, Gabaccia and Zanoni seek to interrogate the timing and causes of transitions—from male-dominated to gender-balanced—in international migrant gender ratios. Along the way, they show how prior studies have defined and measured the relative numbers of males and females among international migrants. They also illuminate various moments of gender balance and of female or male predominance that are included in their typology for distinguishing among differently gendered international migrations.

J. Trent Alexander and Annemarie Steidl take on the first social scientist who defined the laws of migration, E. G. Ravenstein, to reconsider the evidence that led him to conclude that women were more migratory than men. Using 1881 US census microdata that have recently become available and were the original source of the summary table data that Ravenstein used, Alexander and Steidl ask whether the sex differentials he observed are explained by other demographic processes. They begin by replicating and verifying his original analysis. Then they examine whether age standardization [End Page 192] accounts for the sex differentials among internal, or county-to-county, migrants in England and Wales in 1881. Their findings are clear: Ravenstein’s sex differentials overrepresented women because they did not account for men’s higher mortality and their propensity to migrate longer distances. The authors call this “a fundamental flaw in Ravenstein’s laws relating to gender” and suggest that it persists in twenty-first-century descriptions and analyses of migrant gender ratios (see United Nations 2006). Therefore Alexander...

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