Gender Differences in Migration Flow Predictions: Potential Origins and Insights from Theory

Athina Anastasiadou, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR)
Emilio Zagheni, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR)

Migration is a complex process and is difficult to predict. At the same time, migration is known to be a highly gendered process reflecting different motivations, propensities, and outcomes of migration by gender. Such differences are mirrored in the fact that on average 45% of the bilateral migration corridors worldwide are male-predominant while 32% are female-predominant. As theories and models have been shaped over decades around the narrative of the male migrant, this can potentially translate into discrepancies in migration predictions by gender. Using one of the most comprehensive macro-level data sets on bilateral migration flows disaggregated by sex, we aim to explore and understand such differences in migration predictions. We compare the predictive performance of a basic gravity model to simpler deterministic methods. Our findings show that overall worse performance measures are achieved for female migration flows compared to male when applying the baseline model. In male-predominant corridors the models tend to predict the male flows better than the female ones and vice versa. For gender balanced flows they seem to perform equally poorly. Further enhancing our understanding of the underlying mechanisms resulting in different prediction accuracy can potentially inform the work of international organizations, researchers, and policy-makers.

Keywords: Gender Dynamics, International Migration, Data and Methods

See paper.