Engendering cumulative disadvantage: Explaining the experiences and outcomes of skilled migrant women

Despite a burgeoning population and growing interest, gendered analyses of skilled female migrants are lagging and in turn, theoretical and policy frameworks have been built with a male migrant in mind. This is problematic given that we understand gender, along with other factors like race, class, and social status, impact outcomes of female migrants in general. Gender plays a role in determining the effects of both drivers of migration, and patterns of migration. There are distinct gender differences in employment rates, income, self-reported satisfaction, and access to training that do not abate with time. To improve our understanding of skilled migration and its interplay with gender, we undertook a systematic literature review focusing on factors and mechanisms that mediate the employment outcomes for skilled female migrants in destination state. The corpus of reviewed papers includes 94 articles published between 1980 and 2024 addressing skilled female migrants where skilled aligns with OECD or ILO definitions of skilled. These were double coded following a deductive coding approach. From the analysis of the corpus, we identify 7 explanatory factors and 3 mechanisms which interact to shape employment outcomes of skilled female migrants. We employ transnational feminist geopolitics as an analytic lens to understand the multiple, socially constructed-spatially contingent forms of gendered disadvantage which intersect and accumulate across space and time for SMW. We capture this relationship—between the identified explanatory factors, mechanisms, and outcomes—in a novel gendered framework of cumulative disadvantage.