Migration is not a gender-neutral process; it is a social phenomenon structured by gendered norms, opportunities, constraints and practices. Scholarship on women and migration has moved beyond counting or treating women as passive dependents of male migrants to analysing how migration actively reshapes gendered identities, social roles and life trajectories. This article synthesizes conceptual and empirical work that illuminates how gender organizes migration pathways and how migration, in turn, precipitates identity transformation for women. Drawing principally on a foundational ethnographic study and a recent regional scoping of gendered health and social outcomes, the piece highlights mechanisms of change (labour and care regimes, transnational family practices, and encounters with institutions), the unevenness of empowerment and vulnerability, and the policy implications of centring gender in migration analysis (Hondagneu-Sotelo, 1994; Cabieses et al., 2023).
The gendered dynamics of migration pathways
Women’s migration trajectories are shaped by gendered labour markets, family strategies and migration regimes. Early ethnographic work demonstrated that Mexican women who migrate to the United States often enter distinct circuits of work (domestic service, care, service industries) that both constrain and create new social possibilities (Hondagneu-Sotelo, 1994). These occupational niches are gendered not simply because of job segregation, but because they are embedded in cultural expectations about care, respectability and family obligations. Such structural segmentation affects not only economic outcomes but the everyday practices through which women enact and reconfigure gendered selves.
Contemporary reviews confirm that gender remains a crucial axis of differentiation across the migration cycle. Recent syntheses emphasise that gender intersects with legal status, ethnicity, age and socioeconomic position to produce distinctive vulnerabilities — for instance, exposure to gender-based violence, barriers to reproductive and mental health services, and constrained labour market integration — that shape migrants’ social incorporation and identity work (Cabieses et al., 2023). These findings underline that the “experience of migration” for women must be understood through both structural constraints and embodied practices.
Identity transformation: processes and domains
Migration often triggers processes of identity renegotiation that operate across several domains.
Labour and professional identity
Entry into new labour markets frequently compels women to reconceive their occupational identities. For many, migration entails a downward occupational shift relative to qualifications held in origin countries; nonetheless, workplace participation can also open routes to autonomy, new skills and alternative social networks. Ethnographic accounts show how women reinterpret notions of respectability and competence in light of paid labour outside the household, thereby producing hybrid professional identities that straddle origin- and destination-country norms (Hondagneu-Sotelo, 1994).
Familial and care identities
Transnational family relations are central to identity transformations. Women frequently assume remitting, caregiving and managerial roles across borders (transnational motherhood, long-distance caregiving), roles that reconfigure intimate identities and responsibilities. These practices can produce powerful senses of agency while also layering emotional strains and moral dilemmas, as women negotiate responsibilities to children and ageing kin in different national settings (Hondagneu-Sotelo, 1994).
Bodily and healthed subjectivities
Health-related experiences — including reproductive care, exposure to violence, and access to mental health services — influence how migrants experience embodiment and selfhood. Recent regional work in Latin America and the Caribbean documents how gender-sensitive health determinants (e.g., gender-based violence, reproductive health barriers) mediate migrants’ capacities to preserve or transform pre-migration identities, and often force renegotiations of bodily autonomy and social citizenship (Cabieses et al., 2023). These embodied processes of identity reconfiguration are consequential for long-term social integration.
Intersectionality and structural constraints
A key lesson from both classic ethnographies and contemporary reviews is that gender does not operate in isolation. The interaction of gender with legal status, race/ethnicity, class and sexuality shapes the possibilities available for identity change. For example, undocumented status amplifies precarity and restricts institutional access, thereby limiting the capacity for positive identity transformations and increasing exposure to exploitation (Cabieses et al., 2023). Similarly, racialised stereotypes about particular groups of female migrants can constrain mobility and social recognition, reinforcing hierarchies that reconfigure identity projects along both liberatory and oppressive lines (Hondagneu-Sotelo, 1994).
Agency, resilience and ambivalence
Migration produces ambivalent outcomes. While structural constraints are real and sometimes severe, women migrants are not merely passive victims. Longitudinal ethnographic evidence demonstrates women’s tactical agency: negotiating employers’ expectations, forming mutual aid networks, leveraging transnational ties, and strategically mobilising cultural repertoires to claim dignity and resources (Hondagneu-Sotelo, 1994). Contemporary regional analyses similarly observe adaptive strategies but caution that agency should not be romanticised; resilience often coexists with new forms of vulnerability that require attentive policy responses (Cabieses et al., 2023).
Implications for research and policy
Two linked imperatives emerge for scholarship and policy. First, research must remain attentive to gender as a dynamic, intersectional process across the migration cycle — from pre-departure aspirations to settlement and potential return — and must integrate qualitative life-course approaches with gender-disaggregated quantitative data. Second, policy frameworks for migration, labour and health must be gender-responsive: labour regulation should recognise care work and address segmentation; health systems must dismantle barriers to reproductive and mental health care for migrant women; and protection mechanisms must be strengthened against gender-based violence. Regional evidence underscores that applying gender approaches is not only analytically necessary but practically urgent for improving health and social outcomes among migrants (Cabieses et al., 2023).
Conclusion
Gender fundamentally shapes the trajectories, experiences and identity transformations of migrant women. Classic ethnographic work laid the conceptual groundwork by showing how labour, family, and cultural expectations mediate migration’s effects on gendered selves (Hondagneu-Sotelo, 1994). Recent, regionally focused syntheses have extended this analysis by documenting the manifold health-related and institutional mechanisms through which gender and migration intersect, and by highlighting policy shortfalls that bear directly on identity outcomes (Cabieses et al., 2023). Together, these literatures make clear that any comprehensive account of migration must centre gender — not as a fixed category but as an active dimension of social life that is reworked in the crucible of movement. Future work that combines life-history methods, intersectional analysis and policy evaluation will be essential to map more fully how identity transformations unfold across contexts and time.
References
- Cabieses, B., Velázquez, B., Blukacz, A., Farante, S., Bojórquez, I., & Mezones-Holguín, E. (2023). Intersections between gender approaches, migration and health in Latin America and the Caribbean: A discussion based on a scoping review. The Lancet Regional Health – Americas, 40, Article 100538.
- Hondagneu-Sotelo, P. (1994). Gendered transitions: Mexican experiences of immigration. University of California Press.
