According to data from UN Women, women make up 48 percent of the 281 million international migrants. Women migrating as workers face various challenges, including potential gender discrimination in the labor market and the lack of support networks in a foreign country. While this lack of support networks can also affect male migrants, it is women who have to deal with it in addition to the gender prejudices that persist in different societies, which can be more or less evident depending on the destination country.
Furthermore, migrant women workers send a substantial portion of their earnings back to their home countries, often at an equal or higher rate than men. Unfortunately, it is difficult to get a precise idea of remittances, as comprehensive statistics are lacking. However, it has been established that migrant women workers are more likely than men to send regular remittances due to the stronger family ties women often maintain and the desire to protect and financially support their families. This underscores the connection between women's caregiving roles at home and their greater tendency to send remittances.
A significant characteristic of the phenomenon of migrant women is their strong presence in informal work, which is poorly paid and unregulated. In 2021, the main employment sectors for migrant women were services (79.9 percent), industry (14.2 percent), and agriculture (5.9 percent). There are more migrant women than men working in service-related fields, often due to the growing demand for labor in caregiving activities, such as healthcare and domestic work.
Of the more than 67 million workers over the age of 15 in the domestic sector, 80 percent are women, and one in five is a migrant.
Were you aware of these statistics? When creating our roadmap for the development of the project, it was very important for the ADA consortium to consider migrant women. We saw quite clearly that the digital world offers enormous advantages for entrepreneurship when financial resources are limited, as is often the case at the beginning of any migration process.
We believe in entrepreneurship as a tool for empowerment, and we also believe that migration can be a key factor for the economic development of our economies.
Do you also believe this? What can be improved in different European Union countries to help migrant women innovate?
Source: ONU WOMEN.
