Gendered Structures of Overseas Mobility: A Sociological Study of Female Migration from Pakistan

Abstract

Female migration from Pakistan was one of the most under-theorized aspects of South Asian migration. This study adopted a qualitative research design. This research applied three frameworks: the feminization of migration (Hondagneu-Sotelo & Cranford, 2006; Silvey, 2004), the concept of mobility regimes (Martin & Dragojlovic, 2019) and intersectionality (Docquier et al., 2009; Khattab et al., 2020). This study analyzed the sociological perspective of female overseas migration in Pakistan by focusing on the structural, cultural and institutional processes that either hinder or facilitate women's overseas mobility from Pakistan. Women accounted for a mere 0.94 percent of all registered emigrants in 2023 (8126 out of 862625), their skill profile was far from being of the same magnitude as male emigrants. About 45 percent of the females were in highly qualified and skilled occupations compared to about five percent of the males. The United Kingdom is consistently the largest share of all female Pakistani emigrants (5.6–11.6 per cent) compared to its share of the BEOE emigration (0.1–1.9 per cent) in 2019–2022. There were four governance system gaps in Pakistani emigration, the invisibility of female professional migrants who do not register with BEOE under the employer-sponsored visa pathway; a lack of bilateral ethical recruitment agreement between Pakistan and NHS England despite an increase of nurse emigration between 2019 and 2022; absence of gender-responsive return support services; and inadequate protection mechanisms for domestic worker emigrants in the Gulf destination countries. This research argued for the intersection of three structuring forces; patriarchy, which in Pakistan limits women's movement within the country, the conditions on which their migration to the overseas countries is socially acceptable, and women's agency, through negotiation and strategic use of educational qualifications, as well as transnational identity formation, in the face of these constraints. This study contributes to the feminization of the migration by describing the case of Pakistan, and to the mobility regimes by detailing the interaction between macro-level structures and micro-level agency in a patriarchal.

Keywords: female migration, gendered mobility, Pakistan, patriarchy, feminization of migration, skilled women migrants, agency, mobility regimes, transnationalism