Why do women constitute almost half of the international migrant population ??
Answers
Until the late 1970s, most writings on international migration either focused explicitly only on male migrants (usually conceived of as workers) or seemed to assume implicitly that most migrants were male. That assumption was particularly prevalent when attention was focused on the economic aspects of international migration, because it was widely believed that the participation of women in international labor migration was negligible.
Of course, such beliefs were rarely based on statistical evidence since, both then and now, data on international migrants often were not classified by sex. Consequently, when scholars began to call attention to the participation of women in international migration, one of their tasks was to refute those beliefs.
Until recently, a comprehensive set of global estimates permitting an assessment of the extent of female migration was not available. The first such set, containing estimates for the period 1965-1990, was released by the United Nations Population Division in 1998. Estimates at the country level were derived from the number of foreign-born persons enumerated by population censuses, complemented by information on the number of refugees. In 2002, the UN extended estimates of the overall number of migrants (both sexes combined) to 2000, setting the stage for a similar extension of the estimates by sex. As a result, it is now possible to trace the evolution of the number of female migrants from 1960 to 2000.
New Revelations
The main revelation of the new set of global estimates by sex is that women and girls have accounted for a very high proportion of all international migrants for a long time. Already in 1960, female migrants accounted for nearly 47 out of every 100 migrants living outside of their countries of birth. (See Table 1) Since then, the share of female migrants among all international migrants has been rising steadily, to reach 48 percent in 1990 and nearly 49 percent in 2000. Although this trend is consistent with an increasing 'feminization' of international migration, the increase recorded is small compared to the high level of feminization that already existed in 1960.