Gendered movements: causes and impacts

• Individuals may migrate for a better life, or to escape poverty, political persecution, or social or family pressures, which may play out differently for women and men.
• Gender roles, relations and inequalities affect who migrates and why, how the decision is made, the impacts on migrants themselves, on sending areas and on receiving areas.
• Experience shows that migration can provide new opportunities to improve women’s lives and change oppressive gender
• Migration can also entrench traditional roles and inequalities and expose women to new vulnerabilities as the result of precarious legal status, exclusion and isolation.
• Migration can provide a vital source of income for migrant women and their families, and earn them greater autonomy, self-confidence and social status.
• At the same time, women migrants, especially if they are irregular migrants, can face violence and discrimination at every stage of the migration cycle.
• Before departure, women can be faced with gender-biased procedures and corrupt agents.
• In fact, gender discrimination, poverty and violence, can provide the impetus for women to migrate or enable women to be trafficked in the first place.