Women on the Move: The Neglected Gender Dimension of the Brain Drain

By J. Dumont, John P. Martin, Gilles Spielvogel. Social Science Research Network, 2007

166 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Two trends in international migration flows have attracted much attention recently: (i) the growing feminisation of migration flows; and (ii) the increasing selectivity of migration towards the highly skilled, which in turn has given rise to renewed concerns about the “brain drain” consequences for the sending countries. The two issues have not been considered jointly, however, mainly due to the lack of relevant data. This paper addresses this shortcoming by looking at the gender dimension of the brain drain, based on a new comparable data set that has been collected by the OECD and which allows us to identify people by country of residence, place of birth, gender and level of education. The evidence summarized in this paper shows that female migration to OECD countries has been increasing significantly in recent decades, so that migrant stocks are now more or less gender-balanced. A more surprising result is that this is also true for the highly skilled. Taking into account the fact that women still face an unequal access to tertiary education in many less developed countries, it appears that women are over-represented in the brain drain. This result is reinforced by econometric estimates showing that emigration of highly skilled women is higher, the poorer is their country of origin. This effect is also observed for men but to a lesser extent. It is not observed, however, at lower educational levels, where the traditional migration hump is identifiable. Econometric estimates also report a negative impact of emigration of highly skilled women on three key education and health indicators: infant mortality, under-5 mortality and secondary school enrolment rate by gender. These results raise concerns about a potentially significant negative impact of the female brain drain on the poorest countries.

Subfields: Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8bd96f20b3ed1e4ead0617982172f0749d2ce528

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Citations in the corpus

A Global Assessment of Human Capital Mobility: The Role of Non-OECD Destinations (2014, unknown): “Our raw data in combination with our imputed data allow us to improve upon existing high-skilled migration indicators (e.g., Docquier & Marfouk, 2006; Docquier et al., 2009; Dumont & Lemaı̂tre, 2004; Dumont et al., 2007).”
A Gendered Assessment of Highly Skilled Emigration (2009, background): “An exception is a paper by Dumont, Martin and Spielvogel (2007) which relies on a similar methodology than the one used here and analyzes emigration rates by gender and educational level from about 75 countries.”
High-Skilled Migration and Agglomeration (2017, background): “Gaule (2014) calculates that less than 10% of foreign-born chemistry faculty in US Ph.”
Gender and International Migration: Globalization, Development, and Governance (2012, background): “In their econometric analysis of emigration from developing countries, Dumont, Martin, and Spielvogel (2007) found that the rate of emigration of highly educated women as compared to men was negatively associated with infant mortality, under-age-5 mortality, and secondary school enrollment rates of…”
Female Migration: A Way Out of Discrimination (2015, background): “2007; Zlotnik, 1990,1995) and comprehensive statistical datasets (Artuç et al., 2015; Docquier et al., 2009; Dumont et al., 2007).”