Asia, gender and migration

Abstract

Women accounted for about 50 percent of the estimated 214 million international migrants in 2010, with 90 percent comprising economic migrants and their families (ILO 2011). This is consistent with the increasing trend in Asian women migrants' participation rates that have ranged from about 45 to 50.1 percent during the period 1960 to 2000 (Zlotnik 2003). Yet these women's migration narratives and the power relations of gender, class, and ethnicity have increasingly been lost under the "feminization" of migration label in migration literature. Generally, migration has been perceived as a masculine or genderless activity and women's migration patterns and economic roles have also been underrated. Fortunately, in recent years women migration scholars have provided new theoretical frameworks for studying women's migration, investigating it through a gendered perspective and contributing to mainstreaming gender into migration (Chant 1992; Jolly 2005; Palmary et al. 2010). This essay interrogates past and present trends in Asian women's migrations in the context of imperial/global-regional labor migration logistics and settlement challenges. It does so through the lens of colonial and national economic growth strategies, the new geographies of migration, and international poverty reduction strategies endorsed by international organizations and states.