Commentary: Gender and Migration: Searching for Answers to Basic Questions

The scholarly literature on gender and migration of the last two decades or so reveals a paradox. Despite the complaint about the lack of attention to the topic and about the putative androcentric assumptions of other scholars that equate migration with males—a gripe that appears with monotonous consistency in most articles and books—this literature is vast. The electronic bibliography WorldCat lists more than 200 books on the subject published since 1990. A similar search for articles produces over 40,000 items. Yet we have not learned much during the last two decades about the most basic question on the topic: how and why the participation of women and men in population movements varies across time and place.

The paradox seems to have several origins. One is that part of the answers to the above questions is quantitative—figuring out the sex ratios of migrations—and, with the exception of a recent resurgence, quantitative research has declined during the last two or three decades in history and sociology, arguably the two principal disciplines in migration studies. Another source can be found in the postmodernist and poststructuralist proclivity for deconstruction and contingency, which has discouraged or even denounced efforts to find systematic cross-cultural patterns as totalizing and universalizing. Gender studies have tended to tag such efforts as naturalizing gender. A tautology and a truism—that gender, as any social category, is a social construction—has been repeated ad nauseam as if it were an insight. Few seemed interested in exploring the relation between the social category and the underlying natural realities—a relation absent from other social categories, such as nationality, ethnicity, and class, and materially irrelevant in others, such as race. The discursive hegemony of “gender” eventually eliminated “sex” as a category even from census forms, passports, and other bureaucratic documents in the United States. So what began as an attempt to distinguish between a natural condition and the social meanings attached to it ended up fusing the two. Unlike other animals, humans have ceased to have sex other than as a verb.

Those tendencies affect even efforts to address the basic question on the relative participation of men and women in population movements. On this issue Donna Gabaccia and Elizabeth Zanoni feel the need in their article on “gender ratios” among international migrants to fault bivariate notions of biologically fixed sexes and remind us that gender is “socially constructed, relational, complex, and fluid,” although the article is actually about sex ratios in a bivariate sense and has little to say about the social definition of femininity and masculinity. A reader unfamiliar with the norms of academe would likely think that this must be a required ceremony.

Yet what follows the requisite ritual is an excellent example of what sound empirical research and conceptual clarity can accomplish. The authors begin with some of the latter, stressing that differentials of a few percentage points hardly amount to male or female predominance. The five categories that they propose (gender-balanced, female/male-predominant, female/male heavily predominant) offer a sensible and useful typology for future studies. It also places the so-called recent feminization of global migration into perspective. The term seems hyperbolic to refer to an increase of two or three percentage points in the female proportion of international migrants over the last half century, from 47 percent in 1960 to 50 percent in 2005 (or to 49 percent in the most recent data for 2010). The authors rightly question both the significance and the consequences of this modest increase. They show previous high aggregate levels of female participation. In the United States it averaged about 44 percent from the late 1830s to the Civil War. After a dip in the 1870s and particularly after the mid-1890s, it rose again after World War I (although the span of their datasets, which end in 1924, misses the most important increase, which occurred after the immigration restrictive quotas of that date and even more after the world depression of 1930). In the rest of the world as a whole, the...