Migration and Demography: TheGender Implications

Sarah Gammage

UN Women

sarah.gammage@unwomen.org

Outline of Presentation

• Key stylized facts

• Gender on the move

• Implications for scenario development

• Discourse/Narrative

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.

ReplacementRate

Policy Responses and MigrationGovernance

• 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.

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

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

Implications Relevant for the ScenarioDevelopment

• 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)

Advocacy/Discourse/Narrative

• Argue from a rights based perspective

• Stress the instrumental gains: well governedand fair migration maximizes the benefitsfrom migration and minimizes the costs(trafficking, violence, lack of social cohesion) and is more likely to crowd-in development in home countries