Abstract: Highly skilled immigration is proliferating as a policy preference among policy-makers within immigration selection design. However, the implications of highly skilled immigration policy for gender awareness are understudied. Given the focus on the labor market within many selection mechanisms, is highly skilled immigration antagonistic to gender equality?  Drawing upon feminist economics, industrial relations and sociology, this paper develops new indicators to assess the gender awareness of a range of methods of highly skilled immigration selection including points tested models and employer-selection models across 12 countries and 39 visa classes. Three key aspects of “gender awareness” are considered: i) The extent to which gender auditing is incorporated into policy-making; ii) the extent to which the different life courses of men and women are acknowledged in policy design; and iii) the definition of “skill” within immigration policy. In applying this theoretical model to a broad range of selection methods currently in operation, I demonstrate variation in government attention to gender concerns. This analysis demonstrates that countries such as Canada and Denmark that undertake gender audits of their immigration laws or admit applicants in female dominated professions perform better in terms of gender awareness than countries like Austria, the United Kingdom and Ireland that do not undertake such audits and focus narrowly on selecting immigrants from male-dominated Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEMS) occupations. This leads to the conclusion that highly skilled immigration and gender awareness are not necessarily irreconcilable. While the gender awareness of immigration outcomes is partially determined by individual agency and global gender inequalities, I find that policy-makers in selecting countries also possess considerable scope in design.

This event is co-presented by the ANU Gender Institute and the Research School of Social Sciences, ANU.

Dr. Anna Boucher is a Lecturer in Government and International Relations at the University of Sydney where she lectures in comparative political science and public policy, including comparative immigration policy. She is Co-founder of the Migration Studies Unit at the LSE and in 2011 convened the Migration and Asylum Section at the European Consortium of Political Research General Conference. She has previously held research fellowships at Carlton, Toronto, and Ottawa Universities and the Australian National University in Canberra. She holds degrees with Honours and a University Medal in Political Science, German and Law from the Sydney University and a Masters of Research with Distinction and a PhD in Political Science from the LSE where she was a Commonwealth Scholar and also held the Zeit-Ebelin Bucerius Scholarship in Migration Studies. She is currently writing two books: One about highly skilled immigration and one about global patterns of immigration, including into the global south.