Mardi | 2011-10-25
B103

Thierry BAUDASSE – Rémi BAZILLIER – Cristina BOBOC-TRANDAS

This paper aims at providing empirical evidences concerning the linkages betweengender equality and emigration. To analyze such linkages, two theoreticalhypothesis can be made. The rst one is that gender discrimination in origincountries can be a push factor for women. Therefore an improvement of genderequality would decrease the flow of female migrants. The second one is that gender discrimination may create a gender bias » in the selection of migrants within a household or a community. An improvement of gender equality would then increase female migration. We build several original indexes of gender equality, using principal component analysis. Our empirical results show that the push factor hypothesis is clearly rejected. All things being equal, improving gender equality at the workplace is positively correlated with the migration of women (especially the high-skilled). We observe the opposite effect for low-skilled men. This result is robust to several specification and several measurement of gender equality.