Gender, migration and globalisation: an overview of the debates.

What does it mean to talk about ‘gender’ in relation to migration? When confronted by this question, scholars and students who already know what ‘migration’ means are puzzled by how they should put this together with an equally vast realm of concepts and facts – those that consider what gender is . Or, to be more precise: what gender does . For this purpose, in this chapter I am providing an overview of what gender does to migration, illustrating some of the ways in which taking a gender perspective changes the way we understand the link between migration and globalisation, and how gender-based differ-ences and inequalities affect (and are affected) by global migrations.I will do this, first of all, by introducing the relevance of gender issues to migration debates, and thus speak of the ‘feminisation of migration’. This, I contend, can be seen at a quantitative and qualitative level. Therefore, the chapter delves into a specific dimen-sion of the feminisation of migration by taking the case of domestic and care workers to discuss issues such as the ‘international division of reproductive labour’ and the ‘global care chain’. In the second part of the chapter I offer an historical overview of the scholar-ship that has developed around the gender–migration–globalisation nexus in the last 40 years. At the end, I outline other possible directions for research in this field