The Effects of Language on the Gender Patterns of Highly Skilled Migration

ABSTRACT

We study how sociocultural and cognitive institutions, as well as women’s rights, differentially influence highly-skilled women and men’s migration patterns. For this matter, we utilize language grammatical structures to account for cognition on gender expectations, in terms of professional careers, by incorporating these into a gravity model. We find language to be useful in explaining the gendered pattern of highly educated migrants, relative to men. Language, we discuss, is a potential variable to account for elusive institutions influencing important career decisions for female migrants, and is useful to advance policies that support them through comprehensive migratory policies.

KEYWORDS:

• Language
• gender
• international migration
• culture
• skilled migrants

Acknowledgments

We want to thank the editor and an anonymous reviewer for helpful comments and suggestions. Also, we are grateful to Professor Amir Shoham for his insightful discussion at the Academy of International Business Southeast Chapter 2019 Conference that took place in San Antonio, Texas. Both authors present no conflict of interests.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed on the publisher’s website.

Notes

¹ For example, the European Union’s migration policies define highly-skilled individuals based on their income; consequently, a lot of college-educated women are not recognized given that they are “underrepresented in the high-income sectors, i.e., engineering or information technologies, but overrepresented in less remunerated professions” (Pagano 2018, 150).

² These correlations are not driven by spurious correlations within language families (Jakiela and Ozier 2018).

³ Semantic assignment, meaning the noun determines the gender, and formal assignment, meaning that the residual nouns are assigned to a gender according to their form.

⁴ The appendix can be found online at www.tandfonline.com/uitj.