The gender-migration nexus: debates and main issues

This chapter provides an overview of both how taking a gender perspective changes our understanding of migratory phenomena and how gender-based differences and inequalities affect (and are affected by) migration. In so doing, it discusses the notion of ‘feminization of migration’, which may have quite different meanings when we take it as a quantitative or qualitive matter. Secondly, it offers an historical overview of the scholarship that has developed around the gender-migration nexus in the last 50 years. The chapter pays specific attention to the case of migrant domestic and care workers, which have become a central object of inquiry in such scholarship, mobilizing notions such as ‘international division of reproductive labour’ and ‘global care chains’.