Gender Perspectives on Migration: Challenges and Opportunities

Migration is rarely just about packing a bag and boarding a train. It is shaped by who you are, what you can carry, and what society allows you to do once you arrive. For women, every stage of the journey is filtered through gender, sometimes as a barrier, sometimes as a quiet act of rebellion. Looking at migration through a gendered lens reveals stories that mainstream data often misses: the wife who runs a farm alone in Bihar while her husband works in Punjab, the nurse from Kerala who supports three households across two countries, the tribal girl from Jharkhand stitching garments in a Bengaluru factory. These are not exceptions. They are the new face of migration.

Why gender matters in migration studies
Intersectionality in migration
How layered identities shape outcomes
Women’s agency in migration
Coping strategies in adverse conditions
Gendered experiences of migration
Different reasons, different routes
De jure and de facto female-headed households
The vulnerabilities exposed by crisis
Policy gaps and the road ahead

Why gender matters in migration studies

For decades, migration research treated women as passive followers. They were the wives who tagged along, the daughters who were sent for marriage. The male migrant was the worker; the female migrant was a dependent. This framing collapsed once the numbers became impossible to ignore. According to UN Women estimates, women now account for nearly 49 per cent of all migrants from India, with domestic work being the largest sector driving international female labour migration.

This shift is called the feminisation of migration. It does not simply mean more women are moving. It means women are increasingly migrating independently, as primary earners, often into sectors like care work, nursing, garment manufacturing, and construction. Yet visibility in numbers has not translated into visibility in policy. Migrant women continue to be classified as associational movers in many official datasets, which keeps their economic contributions and their specific vulnerabilities out of mainstream discussion.

Intersectionality in migration

Gender does not operate alone. A Dalit woman migrating from rural Odisha to a Bengaluru garment factory faces a stack of disadvantages: her gender, her caste, her language, her rural origin, and her informal employment status all interact to shape her experience. This layered reality is what scholars call intersectionality, a concept introduced by Kimberlé Crenshaw to describe how different forms of oppression overlap and reinforce each other.

Applied to migration, intersectionality explains why migrant women so often end up at the bottom of both formal and informal economies. The framework helps researchers see how dislocation, labour market segmentation, and lack of access to reskilling combine to mould migrant women’s identities at the destination. It also clarifies why a one-size-fits-all migration policy rarely works. The needs of a highly skilled IT worker moving to Hyderabad are radically different from those of a tribal adolescent recruited into a spinning mill, even though both are technically internal female migrants.

How layered identities shape outcomes

Take the example of seasonal sugarcane harvesters in Maharashtra. A study on internal migration and gender documented how women migrant workers in this sector face such severe pressure to keep working that some undergo hysterectomies to avoid losing wages during menstruation. The intersection of poverty, caste, gendered labour contracts, and the absence of social protection produces an outcome that pure economic analysis cannot explain. It is gender plus class plus caste plus migration status, all operating at once.

Similarly, migrant women in cities often face heightened risks of sexual and gender-based violence. Researchers note that gender intersects with ethnicity, age, religion, and migration status, widening vulnerability and making reporting harder due to fear of retaliation, language barriers, and lack of social networks at the destination.

Women’s agency in migration

The intersectional lens reveals vulnerability, but it would be misleading to portray migrant women only as victims. Women are also strategists, negotiators, and decision-makers. They use migration to bypass restrictive family norms, to fund their siblings’ education, to escape unhappy marriages, or simply to build a life on their own terms.

A study of highly skilled Indian women who migrated to the Netherlands and the United Kingdom found that migration can represent an opportunity to diverge from normative paths and escape from patriarchal expectations, even when women continue to negotiate with cultural constraints. Many of them delayed marriage, pursued advanced degrees, and used international mobility as a tool for personal as well as professional growth.

Coping strategies in adverse conditions

Agency does not only mean choosing to leave. It also shows up in how women survive once they arrive. Migrant domestic workers in Gulf countries form informal networks, share housing, pool savings, and circulate information about exploitative employers. Nurses from Kerala have long used migration as a deliberate career strategy, moving to West Asia, Europe, and North America to secure financial independence and reshape their families’ status back home. The return migration of women to Kerala shows that migration alters gender relations within households, sometimes giving women lasting control over decision-making, property, and children’s futures.

Even when state policies attempt to restrict women’s mobility under the banner of protection, women find ways around them. Research on women domestic workers from Kerala shows how restrictions framed as protective measures have pushed many women into informal recruitment channels, where they negotiate complex networks of agents, employers, and intermediaries. Their persistence in navigating these systems is itself an expression of agency, even if the conditions remain risky.

Gendered experiences of migration

Men and women do not migrate the same way, for the same reasons, or with the same consequences. Recognising these differences is at the heart of gender-sensitive migration analysis.

Different reasons, different routes

Indian Census data has long shown that marriage is recorded as the dominant reason for women’s migration, while employment dominates for men. But this is a partial story. Many women migrate for work but record marriage as the reason because it is socially acceptable. A study on patterns and determinants of female migration in India argues that female migration, like male migration, is largely a response to spatial inequalities in socio-economic opportunities, even though it is often misread through a cultural lens that privileges marriage as the explanation.

The destinations differ too. Men dominate construction sites, transport, and heavy manufacturing. Women cluster in domestic work, garment production, care work, and seafood processing. The long-distance internal migration of young women from Jharkhand and Odisha to southern India’s garment industry illustrates how recruitment networks deliberately target young, unmarried women from tribal areas, channelling them into specific labour corridors that are shaped by both gender and regional inequality.

De jure and de facto female-headed households

One of the most important conceptual distinctions in gender and migration studies is between de jure and de facto female-headed households. A de jure female head is a woman who is legally and socially recognised as the head of her household, typically because she is widowed, divorced, separated, or unmarried. A de facto female head is a woman who effectively runs the household and makes its key decisions, even though a male partner is legally the head. This usually happens when the husband has migrated for work, is chronically ill, disabled, or unemployed.

Male out-migration creates large numbers of de facto female-headed households in rural India. In the Koshi River basin of Bihar, a study across 33 villages found that distressed male outmigration, driven by recurrent floods, landlessness, and poverty, has fundamentally altered work and survival for the women left behind. These women take on agricultural decisions, livestock management, children’s schooling, and dealings with banks and government officials, roles they were previously excluded from.

The implications are mixed. On one hand, women gain new authority and skills. On the other, they often carry an enormous additional workload without formal recognition or legal rights over land and resources. Research from western Bihar shows that even when men’s migration brings in remittances, left-behind women face gender-based disadvantages in food security outcomes, offsetting some of the potential benefits of improved autonomy.

The vulnerabilities exposed by crisis

The COVID-19 lockdown was a stress test for migrant women. Narratives from women migrant workers in Delhi and the National Capital Region revealed that the pandemic did not create new inequalities so much as expose existing ones. Without ration cards at their destination, without savings, and often without legal documentation of employment, migrant women bore the sharpest edge of the crisis. Many returned to villages they had left precisely because those villages offered no future, only to find themselves trapped again.

Policy gaps and the road ahead

Despite the growing feminisation of migration, policy frameworks remain skewed. The Emigration Check Required category, age restrictions on women’s overseas work, and the routing of female domestic worker recruitment through state-run agencies are all attempts to protect women, but they often push aspiring migrants toward informal channels with greater risk. Government data shows that Kerala, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Telangana, and Maharashtra are the top sending states for women domestic workers, with the UAE, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Bahrain as primary destinations. Each step of this corridor needs gender-sensitive protection rather than blanket restrictions.

For internal migration, the challenge is recognising migrant women as workers in their own right, not as dependents. This means portable ration cards, gender-segregated and safe housing, accessible reproductive health services at destinations, legal aid against workplace harassment, and recognition of skills acquired across state boundaries. Equally important is supporting the women left behind, with land rights, credit access, and agricultural extension services that assume women can be primary decision-makers.

What do you think? If you had to redesign migration policy with women’s agency at the centre rather than at the margins, what would change first? And how should we recognise the unpaid leadership of women who run households, farms, and entire local economies while their husbands migrate?

References

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Gender Perspectives on Migration: Challenges and Opportunities

Table of Contents

Why gender matters in migration studies 🔗

Intersectionality in migration 🔗

How layered identities shape outcomes 🔗

Women’s agency in migration 🔗

Coping strategies in adverse conditions 🔗

Gendered experiences of migration 🔗

Different reasons, different routes 🔗

De jure and de facto female-headed households 🔗

The vulnerabilities exposed by crisis 🔗

Policy gaps and the road ahead 🔗