Gendering Skilled Migratory Streams: Implications for Conceptualizations of Migration

Abstract

The dominant paradigm in studies of international migration has largely neglected the significance of skilled women in migratory streams. Much recent analysis of international migration has been overly influenced by conceptualizations developed in the context of the migration of women who engage in unskilled labor, or of ungendered but implicitly androcentric theorizations of skilled migration, whether arising from a modernization thesis or globalization thesis. In this paper I explore the legacies of such theorizations and the ways in which the presence of skilled women can challenge these conceptualizations. This paper suggests the need to rethink the household-labor market-immigration nexus in the light of issues of social stratification which a focus on skilled women migrants raises.