Over the past decades, dozens of publications have appeared that start out by saying that the field of gender and migration is under-researched. This is not true anymore. The 2006 spring special issue of International Migration Review on gender and migration gave an impressive overview of what has been written in recent years. Much of the current literature on migration shows gender awareness. 

In the spring issue of IMR, theorising in the field of research on migration and gender was identified as one of the greatest challenges for future research. A large part of the earlier research on migration was descriptive. It made little or no use of explanatory models or used gender insensitive models. Models were largely based on male experience. Women were ‘added’ later, but without applying gender as an analytical category, and hence without systematically explaining differences between migrant men and women. Many of the studies on migration that did include women, focused on women only, rather than comparing men and women. Of course these studies also add to our understanding of the gendered nature of migration, but the added value of an approach that compares men to women is widely acknowledged. 

• comparative
• gender
• migration
• vulnerability

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