Female migration shifted from dependent family moves to independent household-head movement

Evidence

Another recent trend has been the feminization of migration. Although women have always formed a large proportion of migrants, their share has gradually increased: by 1995 about 48 percent of all international migrants were women, and they outnumbered male migrants in about a quarter of receiving countries (Zlotnik, 1998). More important was the shift in the character of female migration with a trend away from movement as family members of male workers or refugees and an increase in the number of women who moved independently or as heads of households. However, such changes were not always reflected in public perceptions, nor in migration regulations, which tended to automatically treat women as dependents (Lutz et al. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 3827

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth chasing: how did late-1990s migration regulations finally begin recognizing independent female migrants, and which countries lagged the most?
• SEED: Article angle: the gap between real-world feminization of migration and the regulatory category of ‘dependent woman’ arguably shaped labor markets, remittance patterns, and citizenship policy for a decade.
• XREF: connects to: Colonial tax policy engineered gender-specific labor migration and family rupture. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1662