A Glass Half Full?

Gender in Migration
Studies 1

Spring
1O
40

riginal

Artical

Studies of New York

Blackwell
Oxford,
International
IMRE
2006
0197-9183
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UK
Publishing
Center
Migration
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Migration
Review

Katharine M. Donato
Rice University
Donna Gabaccia
University of Minnesota
Jennifer Holdaway
Social Science Research Council
Martin Manalansan, IV
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Patricia R. Pessar
Yale University

INTRODUCTION
Another special issue on gender? Havent there been enough of those? When
we decided to present the findings of the Social Science Research Councils
Working Group on Gender and Migration2 in a special issue, we were certainly
familiar with the many special issues and literature reviews focused on women
and gender published over the past twenty years. Still we felt that scholarly
1

This special issue is the product of the Gender and Migration Working Group of the
International Migration Program of the Social Science Research Council. The editors would like
to thank Josh DeWind, Director of the International Migration Program, the members of the
Program Committee, and all the colleagues who participated in the various phases of the
Working Group. Funding was provided by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
2Historian Donna Gabaccia (a specialist on the Atlantic migrations of the nineteenth century)
first proposed the formation of an SSRC working group called Gender and Migration Theory
in Spring 2002. In late 2003, Katharine Donato, a sociologist who worked with quantitative
methods to study migration from Mexico, and Martin Manalansan, an Asian-Americanist
ethnographer actively engaged in dialogue with the humanities through ethnic studies and queer
studies, joined the working group, followed later that year by anthropologist Patricia Pessar and
political scientist Jennifer Holdaway. Together this team then recruited contributors for the
special issue. By paying attention to the disciplines, preferred methodologies, and area
specializations of the original team and of the contributors, we hoped to achieve a kind of balance
in the scholarship reviewed and the assessments reached.
2006 by the Center for Migration Studies of New York. All rights reserved.
DOI: 10.1111/j.1747-7379.2006.00001.x

IMR Volume 40 Number 1 (Spring 2006):326

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research on migration and feminist theory had changed so considerably in the

past decade that the time was right for again taking stock. Until the mid-1990s,
most reviews of scholarly literature focused on single disciplines and on
research on women migrants. In the intervening years, in part as a result of
the efforts of the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), the study of
immigration and migration has become more self-consciously interdisciplinary,
and women-centered research has shifted toward, and to some degree has been
supplanted by, the analysis of gender.
Accordingly, ours is a multidisciplinary review that focuses on gender
rather than on women, distinguishing it from its pioneering antecedent, the
1984 IMR special issue, Women in Migration (Morokvasic, 1984). We
include here surveys of anthropology, geography, history, law and society,
political science, psychology, sociology, and sexuality studies, undertaken by
scholars whose geographical specialties reach beyond the United States to Asia,
Latin America, Africa, and Europe.
Our change in perspective reflects two important developments. First,
scholars (including those in the 1984 special issue) have succeeded in bringing
female migration out of the shadows in many disciplines. Indeed, with demographers claiming that, globally, female migration is now virtually equal to that
of males, the phrase the feminization of migration is gaining currency.
Second, and perhaps more important, many migration scholars now insist that
migration itself is a gendered phenomenon that requires more sophisticated
theoretical and analytical tools than studies of sex roles and of sex as a dichotomous variable allowed in the past.
In this introduction, we point toward some of the largest challenges and
greatest rewards of gender analysis. We survey the development of gender
analysis historically and across some important disciplines in migration studies.
In doing so, we seek to explain why some disciplines notably anthropology
have generated theory that has influenced neighboring disciplines, creating
firm grounds for interdisciplinary discussion. We conclude by looking to the
future and pointing to how research design and mixed methodologies might
more truly foster interdisciplinary gender analysis of a wide variety of topics of
theoretical interest to migration scholars.

GENDER: RELATIONAL, CONTEXTUALIZED, MULTISCALAR

Today, many associate gender analysis with postmodernist philosophy and
with a methodological linguistic turn that occurred in the late 1980s and early
1990s. To a limited degree this association is justified: most of the earliest

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scholarly work on gender was done in linguistics, and it focused on the analysis
of languages. Still, even a quick survey of studies published in the twentieth
century reveals that, by the mid-1970s, the term gender was already widely
used in the social sciences. At that time, social scientists from a wide variety of
fields were exploring gender differences and relationships through use of
conventional methodologies, such as surveys, ethnography, archival research,
and participant observation, and some clearly exhibited awareness that gender
was a social construction, different from biological sex.
One consequence is that a significant body of literature on gender roles
emerged. Studies focused on how different societies assigned and established
roles for men and women in different realms of the economy, politics, cultural/
expressive arts, religion, and home. Part of the literature explored the demarcation of public and private spheres, with women mostly located within the latter
and assigned inferior status or value. As a corollary, other studies demonstrated
how the supposed opposition of nature and culture had been used to frame
gender differences. Sexual divisions of labor, especially around household work
and subsistence, were viewed as establishing a binary schema between male and
female work; so too ethnographic ethnological analyses documented the many
specific expressions of these differences. In other words, the social science
literature before 1985 wrestled with the seemingly conflicting ideas of the
universal subjugation of women and culturally specific articulations of gender
differences.
Critiques of binary models and culturally particularistic analyses followed
in the late 1980s when the linguistic turn enabled an idea of gender that was
fluid and not polar, relational and performative, and therefore not merely
ascribed. Social theorists such as Judith Butler and historians such as Joan
Scott opened the door toward understanding gender as a subjective process
rather than as a given or assigned status. However, only after 1990 did gender
analysis become associated with discursive analysis and critiques of structuralist
or positivist methodologies.
Collectively, contributors to this special issue demonstrate how widely
(although not universally) a new, relational understanding of gender has been
applied to the study of migration. This is not to say that studies focused exclusively on men or exclusively on women have disappeared or that analyses that
compare male and female patterns of employment, movement, or political
incorporation have no value. Still, advocates of gender analysis have pointed to
shortcomings in these forms of analysis. Many see male- or female-centered
studies or bivariate analyses that compare men and women as useful first steps
toward gender analysis, but insist they are too limited in what they tell us about

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gender as a way of structuring power in all human relationships, including

those among people on the move.
Most gender analyses assume that maleness and femaleness are defined in
relationship to each other, as other axes of power and difference (class, race, and
ethnicity) are. Rather than viewing gender as fixed or biological, more scholars
now emphasize its dynamic nature: gendered ideologies and practices change
as human beings (gendered as male or female, and sexualized as homosexual,
bisexual, or heterosexual) cooperate or struggle with each other, with their
pasts, and with the structures of changing economic, political, and social
worlds linked through their migrations (Brettell and deBerjeois, 1992;
Hondagneu-Sotelo, 1994, 2003; Mahler and Pessar, 2001). Migrants often
become particularly aware of the relational and contextual nature of gender as
they attempt to fulfill expectations of identity and behavior that may differ
sharply in the several places they live.
Collectively, too, our contributors reveal that gender analysis is no longer
exclusively limited to the analysis of families, households, or womens lives.
Increasingly, the entire migration process is perceived as a gendered phenomenon (e.g., Grasmuck and Pessar, 1991; Hondagneu-Sotelo, 1994; Boyd and
Grieco, 2003). Scholars now analyze gender in the lives of both female and
male migrants, in the politics and governance of migration, in the workplaces
of immigrants, in neoliberal or welfare state policies toward migration or
foreign-born populations, in diasporas, and even in the capitalist world system.
In short, gender analysis of migration is being undertaken across a wide variety
of spatial scales, from the local and familiar to the national and global, leading
anthropologist theorists Sarah Mahler and Patricia Pessar to imagine a gendered geographies of power that explains migration as it links all these domains
(Mahler and Pessar, 2001). The persistence or transformation over time of
geographies of power may be a focus of future work. Alternatively, scholars may
respond to historians insights about the interconnectedness of temporal scales
by seeking to understand how gender shapes the intersection of family cycles
and individual, biographical, and national historical time represented, for
example, by processes such as industrialization, war, diplomacy, or policy making.

THE STATE OF THE FIELD

Based on our reading of reviews in many social science disciplines, we are
pleased to report that the state of gender and migration studies is fundamentally healthy. While many earlier publications, including the IMR special
issue of 1984, lamented the paucity of research on women or gender and

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challenged readers to fill the gaps, we have been impressed instead by the
veritable tidal wave since the late 1980s of research on issues related to gender
and human mobility. This outpouring reflects in part the changing composition of scholars in migration studies, where women represent almost two-thirds
of the youngest cohort of scholars (Rumbaut, 2000). In our literature review
across the disciplines, female researchers are also somewhat more likely to
undertake both women-centered and gendered studies of migration than are
men. Furthermore, although some have moved flexibly back and forth between
gender analysis and women-centered studies in the last decade, others have
opted decisively for one or the other and see fundamental tensions between the
two approaches notably that focusing on women suggests too much
uniformity within a group that shares some essential, yet usually unspecified,
characteristics. Still others have decried the tendency to conflate gender with
women.
While happy to point to a fundamental increase in research on gender
and migration, we sought also to analyze the recent outpouring with a critical
eye. Which disciplines have generated theory about gender? Why have some
disciplines embraced gender analysis more enthusiastically than others? What
has been the impact of gender analysis across the many disciplines that
contribute to the study of migration? Even more important, what has been the
theoretical impact of gender analysis? As Charles Hirschman has pointed
out, The field of migration studies as a whole . . . has remained marginalized
because of the lack of a theoretical core (Hirschman, 2001). In one sense, it
would be surprising for a single theoretical core to unite a field to which so
many disciplines now contribute and contribute from diverse theoretical and
methodological perspectives. Still, it is important to point to theoretical work
on gender and migration that is now influencing empirical research in a
number of related disciplines and to understand which disciplines are theorizing, or responding to theorizing, across disciplinary boundaries.
We were pleased to discover an ongoing and widening interdisciplinary
dialogue about gender that could, conceivably, contribute to new advances in
both migration and gender theories in the years ahead. Nonetheless, our survey
of the earliest history of gender analysis in the study of migration suggests how
the gendering of the disciplines themselves, along with decidedly gendered
professional and scholarly practices within disciplines, consistently worked
to sidetrack or to marginalize theories and findings about gender. In presenting our own review of gender analysis across the many disciplines that
contribute to migration studies, we hope to prevent a similar outcome in our
own times.

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EARLY WORK ON WOMEN AND GENDER

Although we asked contributors to this special issue to focus on recent work
and on international (rather than internal) migrations, the scholarly study of
both short- and long-distance movements has a rather long history. And that
history was itself gendered. A gender analysis of past scholarship suggests
where, when, and by whom particular modes of thinking about migration
earned the imprimatur of theory, and why work by female researchers on
women or gender so rarely achieved that status. Understanding the gendering
of past migration scholarship can, we believe, help us identify potentially
comparable developments in our own times.
The male geographer usually cited as the first theorist of migration, E. G.
Ravenstein, explicitly accepted a notion of dichotomous gender theorizing,
for example, that women were more migratory than men, at least over short
distances (Ravenstein, 1885). Surprisingly, however, few scholars subsequently
tested his gendered laws of migration. In the 1920s, financial assistance from
the SSRC permitted Willcox and Ferenczi to compile a monumental survey of
international migration statistics (Willcox, 1929). In this work, they noted
variations in gender ratios among migrants (at a time when international
migrations were heavily male-dominated, as Ravenstein would have predicted),
but they did not offer to explain them.
Surprisingly, the subsequent and rapid midcentury feminization of
international migration a sharp violation of Ravensteins theoretical
work seemed of no interest to anyone. And when a group of U.S. government
statisticians (Houstoun et al., 1984) finally called attention to this transition
from male- to female-dominated international movements, their explanations,
too, generated little further research among mainstream migration scholars
(but see Donato, 1992; Gabaccia, 1996). Why? At least two reasons come to
mind: it may have been that existing explanations were seen as not theoretical,
or it may have been that the academy still had too few women to evaluate
existing explanations.
Women and gender were also central in early studies of U.S. immigration. In the first decades of the twentieth century, highly educated women
many sympathetic to womens rights and the suffrage movements were as
involved in immigration research as were men, and their work was supported
by research foundations then in their infancy. Like their counterparts later in
the century, women researchers often focused exclusively on immigrant
women, children, and family life. The influential Pittsburgh Survey of 1907
(Greenwald and Anderson, 1996) employed women researchers in part to

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guarantee that women workers and immigrant families and communities were
surveyed (Butler, 1909; Byington, 1910). Male and female researchers alike
used quantitative and statistical methods into the 1920s ( e.g., More, 1907;
Van Kleeck, 1913; Manning, 1930). Others experimented with qualitative
methodologies (notably personal narratives, participant observation, and oral
history), still widely used by scholars today. Such qualitative methods may have
been particularly attractive to the mostly female full- or part-time reformers
and activists of the social settlement movement (e.g., Ets, 1970).
Alas for migration theory, the female researchers most familiar with
survey methodologies, along with most of the activists in the social settlement
houses, found long-term employment after 1920 in local governments (as
founders and administrators of social welfare and public health agencies) or in
the federal Womens Bureau, rather than in the academy. Even at the University
of Chicago, where an almost entirely male sociology department coexisted
with the casework-oriented School of Social Service Administration (SSA)
with origins in one of Chicagos Social Settlement Houses, it was the work of
men in the sociology department that defined those forms of knowledge
understood as theory. Edith Abbott, an early dean of the SSA (and author
of so many quantitative analyses of immigrants, female employment, and
criminality that she was known as the passionate statistician), is today better
known as a founder of social work than as a social theorist or survey researcher
(for an early example of her quantitative work, see Abbott, 1905).
In the years after World War I, funders of social science research,
including the Russell Sage Foundation and the SSRC, began to deny funding
to research projects that seemed too closely associated with either reform or
with social service. Funding increasingly went to male researchers (sometimes
with female assistants) with university appointments (Deegan, 1988; Yu,
2001).3 As a result, the main theory shaping U.S. immigration research for the
next half-century (e.g., assimilation theory) emerged from the brains and pens
of a sociology department that had separated itself from women researchers in
the settlement houses and in the new applied field of social work.
In the 1960s, scholarly interest in migration reemerged alongside
feminism, but this time it motivated more women to seek scholarly careers. In
3

The state of current historical research does not allow us to conclude that theoretical or
quantitative work undertaken by University of Chicago or Columbia University sociologists
came to be gendered as male during these years, only that these approaches seemed less tainted
by politics, public policy, and human emotion. For a discussion of how contemporary theory has
been gendered as male, see Lutz, 1995.

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the 1970s, many anthropologists and social historians engaged in an early form
of gender analysis, borrowing from anthropologys attention to sex as a fundamental element of all human societies and cultures. Theorizing about the
public and private (Rosaldo and Lamphere, 1974; Yans-McLaughlin, 1977;
Tilly and Scott, 1978), scholars drew on empirical studies of immigrant and
minority families and argued these were places where the activities of men and
women intersected and interacted. This interdisciplinary scholarship became
housed in university departments of anthropology, history, and interdisciplinary womens studies and ethnic studies.
In feminist work on immigrant women in the 1970s and 1980s, we can
also discern early efforts to create a multidisciplinary or even interdisciplinary
field of migration studies. Unfortunately, collaborative and interdisciplinary
essay collections and bibliographies on migrant women (Morokvasic, 1984;
Simon and Brettell, 1986; Gabaccia, 1989, 1992) had little impact on migration studies, where womens experiences tended, at best, to be relegated to
conference panels or book chapters on the family. By addressing only half (or
in the case of earlier male-dominated migrations, much less than half ) of the
migrant population, women-centered work could be and was easily dismissed as
marginal, and was more than once charged with reductionism (Leeds, 1976;
Morokvasic, 1983).
Repeatedly, across the twentieth century, then, female researchers had
studied immigrant women and engaged in gender analysis only to see their
work (and often their places of employment) separated from the sites sociology
and other academic departments and foundations that defined theory and
value in the scholarly study of migration. In seeking to understand how the
creation and defense of disciplinary boundaries (often through conflicting
understandings of theory and method) influences the contemporary study of
gender and migration today, it is helpful to bear in mind these patterns of
the past.

DISCIPLINARITY, THEORY, AND METHOD IN STUDIES OF

GENDER AND MIGRATION
Theoretical formulations of gender as relational, and as spatially and
temporarily contextual, have allowed scholars in a surprising (although not
unlimited) range of disciplines to create and nurture interdisciplinary dialogue
about questions central to all migration scholarship. By attending to gender
analysis of migration, we can also glimpse a history of the recent evolution of
migration studies that may differ from others understanding of the past

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11

decade. For example, unlike the field-building initiatives of the International

Migration Program of the SSRC in which sociologists generally dominated
numerically and provided considerable leadership recent gendered studies of
migration have again coalesced around work done in anthropology and around
qualitative, relational, and eclectic methods rather than through the positivist
quantitative analysis that characterizes much of sociology. One or more
neighboring disciplines, including the humanities, have also influenced work
on gender and migration, often as a result of migration scholars participation
in multidisciplinary or interdisciplinary programs and publications in womens
studies, american studies, ethnic studies, or other area studies (where literature
specialists are well represented).
Yet such interdisciplinary field building has not been without its
problems for social scientists. These have typically been raised by differing
understandings of what theory is (is it prediction, explanation, or interpretation?), or about what methodologies are most likely to advance theory (are they
replicable, quantitative, qualitative, rigorous, and/or eclectic?). Positivist and
theory-driven disciplines (that is, those hoping to predict as well as to understand human behavior) have difficulty accepting gender analysis precisely
because gender is too often theorized as relational and contextual, thus complicating its operationalization. Scholars trained in positivist and quantitative
methodologies are especially likely to respond to calls for gender analysis or
reviews such as ours with the so what question. The rapidly increasing
volume and interdisciplinary nature of research on gender is not sufficient to
convince such colleagues that research on gender adds theoretical value. Until
gender analysis draws on the theories and methods of their own disciplines,
they see little evidence that gender analysis matters.
Feminist scholars rightly insist that attention to gender typically delivers
analyses that differ from male-centered, women-centered, or gender-blind
approaches. Here we point briefly to examples of research that refined or
reconfigured popular theories. By simply including interviews with women as
well as men about work, community formation, and return, anthropologists
working with sociologists theories of labor migration ones that employed
dichotomous categories of laboring that distinguished temporary birds of
passage from settlers (e.g., Piore, 1979) set in motion a sequence of theoretical
revisions that ultimately culminated in the early 1990s in theorizing about
gendered transnationalism (e.g., Grasmuck and Pessar, 1991; Pessar, 1995).
Second, discoveries (e.g., Portes and Jensen, 1989; Light, 2002) that ethnic
entrepreneurship provided immigrants an escape from racially discriminatory
labor markets, and thus a solid foundation for upward mobility, were

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subsequently stripped of some of their positive and even celebratory implications for immigrant incorporation when feminist scholars spoke with the
women and children workers in these typically family-based enterprises. Their
lives suggested the hyperexploitation and hard lives of labor that facilitated
strategies for household mobility (Gilberson, 1995).
A third example of how gender analysis can redirect theory comes from
the Mexican Migration Project (MMP), which since the early 1990s has been
a source of substantial scholarship on Mexico-U.S. migration. A multidisciplinary and binational research effort designed to study and document the process
of Mexico-U.S. migration, the MMP has gathered data from residents in
Mexican origins and U.S. destinations using an ethnosurvey approach that
borrows from anthropological and sociological research methods. These data
have yielded important theoretical insights about men in the process of
Mexico-U.S. migration. Key among them is: 1) although their migration is
initially motivated by economic conditions, soon after it begins, it becomes an
institutionalized and cultural way of life in origin communities; 2) migration
is an intergenerational process passed down from grandfathers to fathers to
sons; 3) women largely remain in communities of origin and rely on remittances sent from men; and 4) social networks are powerful and gendered, and
maintain the institutionalized process of migration.
In the substantial body of MMP scholarship, few studies until recently
have considered the role of gender.4 They now illustrate how adding gender has
theoretical value for the study of Mexico-U.S. migration, revealing processes
that we would not otherwise see. Generally speaking, although more women
are migrating than in the past, traditional explanations for mens migration do
not apply to women. Decisions to migrate are made within a larger context of
gendered interactions and expectations between individuals and within families
and institutions. Therefore, gender is critically important to consider before the
development of theory about who migrates from Mexico and its consequences.
A final example draws on recent scholarship on immigrant incorporation.
Most of the major theories of incorporation devote almost no attention to
gender (see examples such as Portes and Zhou, 1993; Portes and Rumbaut, 1996,
2001; Rumbaut and Portes, 2001; Alba and Nee, 2003; Bean and Stevens,
2003). Portes and Rumbaut (2001:68) do include gender as a component of
their segmented assimilation model, but it is discussed only briefly in the
4

In large part, this is related to the male bias among respondents and the practice of interviewing
only (or largely) male household heads (see Curran et al. in this issue for more details on this
point).

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narrative, referring to the ways that different socialization of adolescent boys

and girls affects their educational aspirations and achievement. The authors
report significant gender gaps, often of ten percent or more, and in some cases,
greater than the difference attributable to social class or ethnic background, in
educational aspirations, engagement, and attainment, as well as in self-esteem
and language acquisition. Yet there is almost no exploration of the gendered
home or school processes that produce these differences.5
Gendered analysis in immigrant incorporation does appear in other
studies, however. For example, Lpez (2003) examines the ways in which
gendered childrearing and expectations, combined with race/ethnic stereotypes among teachers and counselors in New York public schools, contribute
to the much higher female graduation rate among West Indian and Dominican
students. Newer work also shows that, despite the overall advantage of women
in educational terms, gendered expectations in the family have a complicated
effect on attainment. For example, although keeping girls indoors means they
are more likely to do their homework, some immigrant parents will not let
their daughters travel out of the neighborhood to better high schools or out of
the city for college, so that often they do not attend the best schools. At the same
time, men and women of the same race and ethnicity also perceive different
responses from teachers, counselors, and employers that shape their educational
and employment experiences (Kasinitz et al., forthcoming).
To sum up, scholarship on women, gender, and migration has progressed
through several stages. Researchers have attempted to fill in the gaps that
resulted from decades of research based predominantly on male migrants and
immigrants. Recent studies have taken the next, crucial step and sought to
reformulate migration theory in light of the anomalous and unexpected
findings. Our review of the essays in this volume suggests that future breakthroughs from gender analysis will be the product of heightened collaboration
across disciplines and innovative ways of combining quantitative and
qualitative methods that understand gender to be relational and contextual,
power-laden and also dynamic.

GENDER ANALYSIS ACROSS THE DISCIPLINES

Collectively the essays presented in this special issue make possible a number
of broad observations about the field of migration studies and the place of
gender analysis within it. First, the recent explosion of interest in gender analysis
5

Stepick (2001) gives a fuller treatment of gender in his chapter in Ethnicities.

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cannot be attributed, as it sometimes is, to the emergence of postmodernist

philosophy and the methodological linguistic turn in the late 1980s. On the
contrary, most of our authors suggest that social scientists in their respective
disciplines turned toward gender analysis largely as an intellectual strategy
for ending the marginalization of the women-centered work perceived and
descried in the 1984 IMR special issue. Contributors also document the rising
importance of interdisciplinary dialogue in scholarship on gender; indeed
many found they could not draw exclusively on authors from their own
disciplines, because research in other disciplines (notably sociology and
anthropology) so often crossed over into their own.
Taken together, the articles in this issue reveal how migration studies, like
other interdisciplinary fields, can function as a powerful site of scholarly creativity. Still, disciplinary boundaries are not likely to disappear any time soon,
and even the most casual reader of these articles will note wide variations in the
practice and acceptance of gender analysis across, and sometimes also within,
disciplines. These variations can be attributed to sharp disciplinary differences
about epistemology, theory, and method. Our authors show, for example, that
anthropologists have often led the way in creating interdisciplinary dialogue,
while psychologists and political scientists have been more hesitant to engage
in discussions of gender, both within or across disciplinary lines.
While certainly influenced by postmodernist philosophy, anthropology
had made analysis of sex central long before 1970. In a sense this discipline
prepared the way for both feminist studies of women in the 1970s and gender
analysis in the 1990s. Given the historical development of the discipline, furthermore, it is not surprising that anthropologists proved especially important in
nurturing interdisciplinary dialogue within migration studies and in encouraging gender analysis not only across disciplinary but also within area studies
boundaries. In Gender Matters, Mahler and Pessar point to tensions between
qualitative and quantitative research methods and concepts as shapers of the
field of migration studies. They highlight the contributions of feminist ethnography in both anthropology and sociology in pushing scholars in both fields
to consider an epistemological debate about the limited possibilities for quantitative, positivist methods to capture the subjectivity and agency of migrants
as they mediate and act upon the world. However, Mahler and Pessar do not
blindly champion qualitative methods, but clearly express the need to create a
bridge between qualitative and quantitative methods that meaningfully brings
together the limits and possibilities of both. Mahler and Pessar emphasize how
ethnographic methods can be used at many scales of analysis and highlight
recent scholarship on households, kinship, and social networks; employment

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15

and its consequences for gendered relations and practices; refugees and
human rights; migration and the social construction of subjects and identities;
gender, sexuality, and the second generation; and transnationalism. The
authors point to gaps in the literature and provide examples of missed
opportunities (such as studies of recruitment) that would have benefited from
a gendered analysis.
The influence of anthropology on neighboring disciplines becomes
particularly obvious in the remaining contributions. Silveys Geographies of
Gender and Migration: Spatializing Social Difference focuses on a small discipline whose theoretical interest in scale, place, and borders sometimes
encouraged methodological eclecticism, benefiting the development of gender
analysis. The geographers whose work Silvey surveys seem to have engaged in
a productive cross-disciplinary exchange at least since the late 1980s. In fact, it
is geographys theoretical interest in space and scale that Mahler and Pessar urge
upon migration specialists with their concept of gender geographies of
power. While early feminist geography scholarship from the 1980s focused
mainly on household analysis, recent studies have been more interested in
examining the gendered relationships between identity, place, and community
among migrants and in how gender is policed in particular locations, from
the local to the global, creating borders. As Silveys list of references also
suggests, geographers trained in the United Kingdom have pioneered
gendered analyses of migration worldwide; as in anthropology, they are not
limited to the United States.
In Gender and Migration: Historical Perspectives, Suzanne Sinke
describes history too as a discipline of both eclectic methodologies and relative
openness to interdisciplinary exchange. Throughout the thirty years under
review in this essay, immigration historians of gender and women have worked
within interdisciplinary fields (notably American studies, womens studies, and
ethnic studies) and absorbed insights from other disciplines, especially sociology
and anthropology. Sinke foregrounds historians research on earlier migrations
and on migrations outside of North America and notes historians frequent
sense of dj vu when reading social scientists findings about contemporary
migrations to the United States. Historical work can thus both point to the
persistence of gendered patterns over long periods of time (raising questions
about the limits of the fluidity many gender analyses posit) and demonstrate
the fluidity of gender as migrants move through time as well as across space.
Whether historians can convince their colleagues in the traditionally ahistorical
social sciences of the importance of theorizing time as well as space in order to
understand migration remains to be seen.

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Calavitas Gender, Migration, and Law: Crossing Borders and Bridging

Disciplines discusses a scholarly field law and society that is itself
interdisciplinary and supportive of gender analysis. Those who have studied
immigration policy and gender have borrowed methods and insights from
history and sociology as well as legal studies. Calavita acknowledges the importance of treating gender as relational, fluid, and contextual, but she also points
to the very powerful ways in which law works to naturalize gender as a dichotomous binary of male and female. Based on her recent research on Italy and
Spain, Calavita also insists on the complex ways in which differing systems of
law and welfare states interact with migrants and local economies and societies
around issues of gender. She is especially critical of broad-brush theories found
in migration studies and calls for theory that better accounts for the diversity
and complexity of interacting variables that most empirical gender analyses
reveal.
Pipers essay, Gendering the Politics of Migration, also points to the
relative dearth of gendered analysis of migration by political scientists.
Although every aspect of the migration process is shaped by political factors
and migration presents many political challenges on the domestic and international levels, the attention of political scientists in the United States and Europe
has been limited to a few topics, including control over entry and exit, and
issues of incorporation and citizenship. Work that employs a gender perspective constitutes an even smaller body of work, and is mostly concerned with
differences in electoral behavior, perhaps partly because of the emphasis on
quantitative methods among most political scientists. In considering the contribution that political science could make to our understanding of gendered
migration, Piper points both to some pioneering studies of gendered patterns
of migration and incorporation and to the growing concern with gender
among international organizations and policy makers. Interestingly, it is
scholars in neighboring disciplines such as Piper herself, and not political scientists who have more often taken up these questions of governance
and the development of gender-fair policy toward migrants. Pipers essay raises
interesting questions about the relationship between disciplinary boundaries
and topical areas and also about the ways in which regional contexts shape the
nature of scholarly inquiry. She especially emphasizes that scholarship on
governance in Asia has a different focus from that in the United States because
temporary migration is much more common there and because citizenship
remains out of reach.
Surez-Orozco and Qin reach similar conclusions about the lack of
gender analysis in their article, Gendered Perspectives in Psychology. (We

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17

suspect, furthermore, that had we included an article on economics, the analysis

would have pointed in a similar direction.) Surez-Orozco and Qin focus on
studies about immigrant youth and provide a convincing case for the potential
of psychology to make major contributions to the field of migration studies.
But they nevertheless emphasize obstacles to the development of gendered
perspectives. Because developmental psychologists insist firmly on a scientific
methodology that emphasizes validity, reliability, and experimental designs,
gender has been treated mainly as a dichotomous variable. Psychologists often
document that sex does or does not make a difference, but they find themselves
unable to explain how, when, and why it makes a difference to be female or
male. Moreover, their interest has been focused almost exclusively on processes
of adaptation rather than on those factors that may initially have propelled
immigrants to leave their countries of origin. As a result, citing work by specialists outside psychology, they echo a common theme: the need for, and
promise of, interdisciplinary scholarship on gender and migration.
As the largest group of scholars in migration studies, sociologists form a
difficult discipline to categorize simply. On the one hand, feminist sociologists
spearheaded early work on migration as a gendered system (e.g., Grasmuck
and Pessar, 1991; Hondagneu-Sotelo, 1994; Sassen, 1996). This important
early research has informed subsequent research and theory development on
gender and migration across the disciplines. Still, Mapping Gender and
Migration in Sociological Scholarship: Is It Segregation or Integration? by
Curran, Shafer, Donato, and Garip, describes a contested intellectual terrain
within the discipline. The authors note a move over the decades from an
additive approach (i.e., studies that include women and men or concentrate on
women alone) toward qualitative research that conceptualizes gender as a central social category organizing the identities, social practices, and institutions
influencing migration. Although qualitative scholarship initially focused on
the units of households and families, it has more recently expanded to consider
workplaces, labor markets, immigrant associations, nation-states, and transnational social networks. Ultimately, however, the authors lament the slow
advance of gender analysis in quantitative research. Their review of four
flagship sociology journals (along with IMR ) is indeed sobering. They find that
a substantial portion of the sociological studies published in these journals both
neglect to include information on the sex composition of sample respondents
and fail to consider migration as a gendered process. They conclude that a
substantial divide remains among sociologists working with differing methodologies and that this creates obstacles for the publication of studies on gender
and migration in the major journals of their discipline.

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Manalansans Queer Intersections: Sexuality and Gender in Migration

Studies concludes our special issue with an illustration of a new interdisciplinary
dialogue that emerged from gender analysts insistence that sex is just as relational and mutually constituted as gender. Manalansan challenges scholars in
migration studies to question their assumptions that sexuality is dichotomous
and fixed, causing them to overlook the sometimes important role that sexuality
and desire play in the migration process (for example, when people migrate to
be able to pursue queer lives and identities). Whereas analyses of other disciplines
in this special issue seems to suggest that gender analysis first developed
in the universities of wealthy, northern, or western first world nations,
Manalansan traces the origins of studies of sexuality in gender and migration
research to Third World feminists who challenged universalist notions of
womens experience and to the growth of gay and lesbian studies outside the
academy. In this newly developing research field, studies of migrants often
provide particularly telling examples of how sexuality, as culturally situated and
relational, can be rapidly transformed by individuals moves across borders.
The interdisciplinary mix that Manalansan finds in this research (anthropology,
history, and sociology, and to a lesser degree, social psychology, with ongoing
dialogue also with the humanities) underscores trends toward cross-fertilization
noted by other contributors.
Collectively the essays suggest why some disciplines have been more
receptive to gender analysis than others. Among gender and migration scholars,
guiding concepts and analytical frameworks have been drawn more frequently
from anthropology and qualitative sociology than from the otherwise more
influential body of knowledge produced by quantitative sociologists. We view
the contributors reports of, as well as calls for, increased borrowing, collaboration, and elaboration across disciplinary divides as healthy developments in the
project of migration studies. In the section that follows, we conclude by exploring, first, how to better navigate the divide between quantitative and qualitative
methods, and second, how to fruitfully assemble a multidisciplinary team to
study broad-ranging migration topics.

WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?

Our contributors reviews of their own disciplines hint at the existence of a
distinction whose boundary is perhaps clearest in the somewhat divided
discipline of sociology between scholars who analyze gender as a
dichotomous (male and female) variable that is easily included in quantitative
models and those who consider that the situational and relational character of

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gender as with variables such as race and class makes it difficult to

capture without recourse to qualitative methods or to theorize on a grand or
universal level. This means that one of the largest challenges of furthering
analysis of gender in migration studies is to find ways to benefit from the
tension between these methodological approaches and to draw upon what each
contributes.
Within each of these methodological approaches, there are some steps
that can be taken to improve our ability to capture the role of gender. Although
it may sound obvious, it bears repeating that both quantitative and qualitative
researchers need to make sure that gender-related data are collected (as they
would with class, race, or ethnicity) even if gender is not initially a primary
focus of their inquiry. This means, for example, finding alternatives to standard
research practices in survey work, such as interviewing only heads of households in cultures where they are predominantly male. Researchers must
routinely ask whether views or behaviors apply to both men and women and
to sons and daughters, and sample sizes must always be large enough to allow
for the analysis of gender in association with other variables. Furthermore,
either the presence or absence of gender differences constitutes a positive
research finding and should be reported, as would the presence or absence of
differences among ethnic, racial, or national groups.
Our second recommendation goes beyond this, and is based on the belief
that collaborative, multidisciplinary research teams, working in innovative
ways and combining quantitative and qualitative methods, can do the most to
advance gender analysis of migration beyond its current state. In the process of
editing this volume, our most intensive discussions have focused on what
disciplines committed to either quantitative or qualitative methods could learn
from each other and from the findings and theorizing of disciplines that have
tolerated a fair amount of methodological eclecticism (history, sociology,
geography, legal studies, womens and ethnic studies).
We have noted that scholars working with quantitative methods do
sometimes undertake limited ethnographic or historical research (or turn to the
appropriate literatures from those disciplines) either during or once they have
completed their analysis. Generally, however, they seek vignettes or anecdotes
to illustrate conclusions reached mainly through quantitative analysis. At the
same time, qualitative researchers may contextualize their work with reference
to the findings of quantitative work.
There are several ways to expand this limited form of interdisciplinary
dialogue. Ethnographic and historical research can generate questions to be
answered more systematically and for much larger populations by survey or

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other quantitative methods. (As an example, see Nelson Lim in Gabaccia and
Leach, 2003.) Conversely, qualitative methods can test survey findings, especially
when explanations for the presence or absence of gender (or other) differences
are not easily explained by the theory that originally drove the quantitative
research agenda. Use of ethnographic research methods by those engaging in
world systems analyses of the mobility of labor, capital, and ideas provides one
illustration of the type of mixed method research we envision.
A fuller illustration is found in a new and promising recent publication.
Its authors, Parrado and Flippen (2005), use qualitative and quantitative
binational data to examine how labor, power, and emotional attachments
inside Mexican families vary by migration and U.S. residency. The key finding
from this work is that, although women are more likely to work after migrating
northward and their employment is likely to yield economic benefits that may
facilitate gender equality, at the same time migration disrupts the social bonds
and support present in the home country and promotes husband-wife dependence. This creates difficulties, particularly for women, who face considerable
obstacles in reconstructing their lives and networks after migration, when they
are often separated from their own families and more dependent on their
husbands relatives. Therefore, in contrast to findings from prior studies,
Parrado and Flippen (2005) argue that womens structural position in U.S.
employment undermines their well-being and relationship power. Migration
itself does little to change gender inequality, and the connection between
migration, employment, and female independence is not necessarily direct and
unidirectional. It varies and develops in different ways among Mexican families
in U.S. destinations.
This study represents a pioneering contribution to the literature on
gender and migration in two respects. It is pioneering in part because of its
interdisciplinary nature. Rather than emphasize processes that operate only in
households or in labor markets, this work moves quantitative research into a
new domain relationships to examine the effects of migration, drawing on
psychology to construct a series of sensitive gender questions about relationship
dynamics and the effects of Mexico-U.S. migration. A second key strength of
the work is its innovative mixed method approach. The authors themselves are
formally trained as demographers in quantitative methods, but the research
team included a small group of community participants who helped design the
survey, implement it, and then analyze the data it generated. The result was a
study that provides a much more nuanced and culturally situated understanding of the ways in which migration affects gender dynamics than is usually
achieved in survey research.

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21

As this suggests, analysis of gender can be pushed to another level

through interdisciplinary collaboration that pursues research across multiple
scales. In many disciplines, scholars still typically associate gender with research
on immigrant and migrant women and turn most often to gender analysis in
order to theorize about women, families, or households. We argue here that
future scholarship must take seriously the insistence of gender theorists that
gender structures all human relationships and all human activities not only
for men and women but also across the many chronological and spatial fields
of migration that Pessar and Mahler (this issue) have described as gendered
geographies of power. An important challenge in deepening and extending
gender analysis is to see gender at work, in the so-called public arenas of politics
or immigration policy or in the global arena of international governance,
for example, of refugee movements. This again requires special efforts to make
gender analysis more compatible with quantitative studies and the development of interdisciplinary, or mixed method, research projects that draw on
the strengths of different perspectives and methods. What shape and direction
might such research take?
We offer one illustrative example, although the possibilities are many.
One important project could examine the problem of gender ratios, focusing
on questions about who migrates, why, where, and over what distances and
periods of times. At least since geographer Ravensteins early work, scholars
have intermittently observed sharp variations in gender ratios among the
mobile, yet there has been little concerted effort to fully document and explain
these differences. Relatively long series of statistics on emigration and on
immigration have differentiated between male and female departures and
arrivals, as do census listings of internal or domestic migrants, thus opening
up good possibilities for quantitative, bivariate analyses at many scales (from
the global to the domestic or local). To explain why some villages or regions
export men, while others export women, and to explain why some cities, counties, or nations attract more women or men requires careful attention both to
gendered access to education and to gendered divisions of labor in sendingand receiving-country labor markets, as well as to the gendered dimensions of
state regulations of the mobile. In the case of refugee migrations, researchers
would need to carefully examine the structures of interethnic violence and the
gendered impacts of violence, conflict, and war. The collaborative project
would also require analysis of migration histories, transnational networks,
and how foreign employers, adoptive parents, or state agencies work to recruit
migrants, including the role of human subjectivity, perceptions, and decision
making.

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In short, an analysis of gender ratios requires the perspectives and

methods of many disciplines. A GIS-trained geographer and a world historian
with quantitative skills could work together to map and then theorize about
variations in gender ratios over the long term; alternatively they could create
testable typologies of male-dominated, female-dominated, and genderbalanced migrations of work seekers, settlers, refugees, tourists, or highly
educated technical or business personnel. A political scientist or legal specialist
could interpret these findings based on their understandings of the gendered
implications of policy toward the mobile, perhaps distinguishing between
state-sanctioned and illegal or undocumented flows. An ethnographer,
perhaps working with a sociologist, could develop a survey that could capture
gendered perceptions and better explain actual decision making in a series of
migration case studies with vastly different gender, age, and class composition.
An ethnographer and a demographer could probe the impact of migrant
gender ratios on rates of fertility in both sending and receiving societies.

CONCLUSION
Research on women, gender, and migration has fundamentally expanded and
changed since it was last surveyed in IMR in 1984. Studies of gender and
migration have opened new avenues of empirical inquiry and theorizing while
also problematizing the meaning of theory and the relationship of theory and
methodologies in an increasingly interdisciplinary field. Our review suggests
why the spread and acceptance of gender as an analytical category has varied
sharply across the disciplines. In some disciplines, we have found a divide
between scholars who view gender as both relational and constitutive of all
human behavior and thought, and those whose methods require them to
analyze gender as dichotomous, bivariate categories of male and female. In
some disciplines, too, scholars treat gender as situational, making it difficult to
capture without recourse to qualitative methods or to theorize on a grand or
universal level that predicts for all times and places. Overall, the openness of
any given discipline to qualitative research and to methodological eclecticism
seems to be the key factor in drawing gender analysis from the margins into the
disciplinary mainstream. In fact, gender analysis has often entered disciplines
from neighboring social science fields (notably anthropology) or even from the
humanities (especially through work in ethnic and womens studies). We thus
see a willingness to tolerate methodological diversity and interdisciplinary
dialogue as crucial to the further development of both gender analysis and
migration studies.

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23

Studies of gender and migration have, in the past, made a special contribution to building the interdisciplinary field of migration studies. By tackling
more consciously the continuing divide between quantitative and qualitative
methodologies, and by experimenting with collaborative research strategies,
specialists in this field can help to carry the field as a whole to the next stage of
theorizing, interpretation, and understanding. In the absence of interdisciplinary experimentation, the possibilities for gendering as male or female particular
methodologies, particular types of theorizing, or even particular disciplines
something that clearly happened in the past to the detriment of scholarship as
a whole remains a constant threat.

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