Episode 21: Looking at migration through the gender lens

The Migration & Diaspora Podcast

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Migration & Diaspora Podcast, with me your host, Loksan Harley. Today I'm joined by Jenna Holliday to take a look at migration through the gendered lens.

So a bit about my friend, Jenna Holliday. Jenna is a migration, labour rights and gender specialist. Jenna consults extensively for United Nations and other international organisations, in particular the International Labour Organization (ILO), the International Organization for Migration (IOM) and UN Women, providing expert support on integrating gender and labour perspectives into migration policy.

Jenna's work is predominantly focused on the Asia region. She is a member of the Expert Working Group for Addressing Women’s Human Rights in the Global Compact for Migration and has written widely on the extent to which development agendas respond to women migrant workers, including the recently published International Journal of Law in Context article entitled “Incongruous Objectives - Endeavouring to Realise Women Migrant Workers’ Rights through the Global Development Agendas”, which I've linked to in the show notes.

I thoroughly enjoyed this chat with Jenna, as it also allowed me to reflect on the way I view gender and its effect on migration and migrant experiences. We look together at various aspects of migration through the gendered lens, including what the data says, how migration governance frameworks consider gender, how gendered experiences increase vulnerabilities for migrant women, as well as how women migrating can represent a way to exercise agency when their life choices are constrained by gender inequalities. And I also ask Jenna how her own migration experiences have been gendered and how the gender terminology and understandings of terms like "gender mainstreaming" are evolving within our community of work.

We really hope you enjoy listening to this one. And if you do or even if you don't, feel free to get and share your feedback via the website at loksanharley.com/podcast or via the Facebook and Twitter pages (the handle for both is @TheMDPcast). Without further ado, here's our interview.

Useful links

• Connect with Jenna on LinkedIn
• Jenna's recent publication: Incongruous Objectives - Endeavouring to Realise Women Migrant Workers’ Rights through the Global Development Agendas
• Jenna's work for UN Women: Migrant Workers in South Asia and the Middle East, a policy brief series
• Jenna's blog post on COVID-19, gender and migration in Central Asia: reinforcing precarity
• Jenna's report: The impact of COVID-19 on migrants in Asia and the Pacific: Rethinking resilience