This document discusses the implications of migration and demography trends on gender. Key points include: aging populations and falling birth rates in developed countries are causing concerns about declining dependency ratios; migration can help address care deficits and get more women into the labor force; scenarios suggest gendered migration for care work will rise; promoting choice and rights for migrants while protecting native workers is important; formalization of labor, delinking visas from contracts, and ensuring access to benefits are implications for scenario development.

1. Migration and Demography: The
Gender Implications
Sarah Gammage
UN Women
sarah.gammage@unwomen.org

2. Outline of Presentation
• Key stylized facts
• Gender on the move
• Implications for scenario development
• Discourse/Narrative

3. Key Stylized Facts
• Aging late industrial/OECD economies combined with falling fertility
rates.
• Key concern about dependency ratios, particularly as they affect
pensions
• Rising care deficits for young, old and infirm
• Similar transitions in middle income countries . Many of these the
focus of S-S migration.
• Similar concerns in middle income countries about parametric and
non parametric “reforms” to pensions systems.

4. Replacement
Rate

9. Policy Responses and Migration
Governance
• Get women into the labor market, increase
fertility rates above replacement rates 
migration can help solve the direct and indirect
problems associated with closing gender gaps in
labor market participation and in making work-
life balance more sustainable.

10. Scenarios
• Gendered migration where women specialize
in care work is likely to rise.
• Opportunities that span the gamut from
domestic work, child-minding, teaching, elder
care, nursing, social work to medical
employment.
• Gender gaps in (native) women´s labor force
participation decline

11. Key Objectives
• Promote movement with choice
• Protect and preserve migrants´ rights
• Protect the terms and conditions of
employment for natives and non natives
• Ensure no differentiability with native labor
force

12. Implications Relevant for the Scenario
Development
• Formalization in host developing countries (and
all the attendant LMIs reforms that this implies:
minimum wages, collective bargaining,
inspection, access to justice, etc.); preventing
informalization in developed countries
• Delinking contracts and visas
• Ensuring portability of skills and pensions
• Guaranteeing access to health care and social
protection
• Signing on to key conventions (C189, rights of
migrants and their families, CEDAW)

13. Advocacy/Discourse/Narrative
• Argue from a rights based perspective
• Stress the instrumental gains: well governed
and fair migration maximizes the benefits
from migration and minimizes the costs
(trafficking, violence, lack of social cohesion)
and is more likely to crowd-in development in
home countries