Women migrants in the global economy: a global overview (and regional perspectives)

• Published in: Gender and development Vol. 27; no. 1; pp. 15 - 30
• Main Authors: Bastia, Tanja, Piper, Nicola
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Abingdon Routledge 02.01.2019; Taylor & Francis, Ltd; Taylor & Francis Ltd
• Subjects: care; family and migration; Feminism; Gendered migration; Geographic mobility; Global economy; Insecure; Internal migration; intra-regional migration; Migrant workers; Migrants; Migration; Social reproduction; South-South migration; temporary migration; Women; women in migration
• ISSN: 1355-2074; 1364-9221
• DOI: 10.1080/13552074.2019.1570734

Huge advances have been made in deepening and expanding our knowledge of gendered migration over the last decades in both theoretical and methodological terms. Empirically it is, however, still the case that North-South migration is at the basis of most theorisations, leaving the characteristics of South-South migration at the margins. In this paper we, therefore, shift the focus to intra- and trans-regional migration in a South-South context in exploring what this means for women migrants. While feminist scholars have highlighted care and the ways in which migration challenges social reproduction as an important issue, mainstream approaches continue to focus predominantly on the 'productive' lives of migrant workers. With migration theories still largely drawing on the experience of South-North migration, there continues to be relatively little understanding of South-South migration's gender dynamics, despite the fact that many of the highly feminised, yet hyper-precarious, migration flows occur intra-regionally.