Social Science Research Council

The International Migration Program established the Working Group on Gender and Migration in 2002 with funding from the Mellon Foundation. Headed by Donna Gabaccia, Katharine Donato, Martin Manalansan and Patricia Pessar, the Working Group assessed the contributions of current scholarship on gender to the study of international migration and sought to promote scholarly attention to gender both as a topic of research and as an analytical concept within the field of migration studies. Following a planning meeting, the group commissioned a series of disciplinary reviews of the literature on gender and migration that was published as a special issue of the International Migration Review in Spring 2006 (for the table of contents, click here).

The special issue shows that research on gender in migration studies has increased substantially in recent years and that in some disciplines gender is now treated as a relational and constitutive element of human activity at all scales of human life. However, it is noticeable how unevenly gender analysis is undertaken across the disciplines and across the scales at which migration is studied.

Gender analysis is still largely, although no longer exclusively, undertaken when examining networks, family, relations and employment, and it is more common in historical, ethnographic and qualitative research than in quantitative research. These methodologies have been better able to incorporate insights and theories of gender from the humanities, where theory means something quite different than it does in core social sciences such as sociology and economics. Even within disciplines, furthermore, gender analysis is often confined to particular subfields rather than being integrated into the disciplinary mainstream.

One goal of the working group, and of the special issue, is to trade the introduction of gender analysis across the disciplines in order to better understand its development and its varying impact in different disciplinary contexts. Given the uneven development of gender analysis across the disciplines, a second goal is to foster interdisciplinary discussions that might point to ways to accommodate gender analysis with mainstream theoretical work in those disciplines where it has been less frequently undertaken or where it remains most marginal.