The past three decades have shown a marked increase in the rate of women migrating internationally for work. Women professionals are now moving as individuals—rather than as part of a family unit—and are reshaping patterns of international labor migration in the process.
Our new study, “Global Gender Gaps in the International Migration of Professionals on LinkedIn,” examines emerging patterns in the feminization of labor migration at a new level of detail. We analyze the gender composition of skilled international migrants, offering insights into how these dynamics vary across countries in specific industries and career stages. Our Immigrant and Emigrant Gender Gap Indexes (iGGI and eGGI) measure skilled migrant inflows and potential outflows to describe these trends.
The findings of our study show that, among LinkedIn users, the global population of immigrant professionals is at gender parity. The professional migrant population is majority-female in key destination countries like the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and France, as well as emerging destinations like South Korea and Singapore. Women are moving abroad to work in industries like finance, healthcare, and real estate.
We also find that men in our study are more open to international relocation than women, but men and women have similar rates of observed mobility. This puzzle lays the groundwork for further research on gender differences in the conversion of migration aspirations into a move abroad. Overall, we find that the population of men and women on LinkedIn that express migration aspirations through international job searches is about five times larger than the population of recently relocated professionals.
Migration research often relies on administrative records or survey data that lack detailed, real-time industry-level information. In this paper, we harness the rich information available from the LinkedIn Advertising and Recruiter platforms to provide new understanding into gender disparities in professional mobility. With detailed information on gender and industry, our study is able to answer longstanding questions about skilled migration that conventional sources cannot address on their own. Additionally, LinkedIn captures a broad population of professional migrants that does not rely on a specific definition based on educational attainment, occupation, or skill category, and offers information about a wider range of countries than is available in OECD data.
This approach allows us to consider under-studied dynamics of migration, such as the selectivity of migrant professionals. We can compare the ways that new arrivals are systematically different from the native-born population because of mechanisms that shape the characteristics of the migrant pool. Our results suggest women professional migrants might be positively selected in key destination countries like the United States, Australia, the United Kingdom, France, and Germany, especially in industries including consulting, finance, and technology. Migrant women are overrepresented relative to the overall professional population in male-majority industries like consulting, technology, finance, and manufacturing/supply chain/logistics.
The timely data in this study also provide insights into potential future trends in the gender composition of professional immigrants by focusing on growing industries employing women and emerging female-majority destinations. Our findings indicate a growing share of women migrant professionals in key industries like finance, healthcare and tech in emerging destination countries like South Korea. Our analysis suggests that countries with higher levels of gender equality, higher wages and more welcoming migration policies can attract more women migrants in the future.
About the Authors
Elizabeth Jacobs, Department of Sociology, University of Connecticut, Storrs, Connecticut, USA
Tom Theile, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany
Daniela Perrotta, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany
Xinyi Zhao, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany and Department of Sociology, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
Athina Anastasiadou, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany and Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute (NIDI)-KNAW/University of Groningen, Groningen, The Netherlands
Emilio Zagheni, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany