Gendering and contextualizing migrants’ support for gender equality

Recently, public debates on migrants’ integration have become increasingly skeptical. A recurring topic in these debates is how migrants view women.

Migrants – especially non-Western migrants – are often portrayed as unilaterally rejecting gender equality, and some have argued that this means that their integration has failed.However, there are marked differences in support for gender equality between migrants from non-Western origins. The research I propose aims to explain this diversity in non-Western migrants’ gender attitudes.

Doing so, this research provides policy-relevant insights into when migrants integrate in a cultural sense, which may also help nuance public debates.

At its core, this research argues non-Western migrants’ support for gender equality is shaped by the contexts in which migrants are embedded.

Existing quantitative studies have paid little attention to how contextual forces shape migrants’ support for gender equality.

However, more qualitatively-oriented fields as gender and transnationalism studies have provided valuable – although somewhat scattered – insights into how migrants’ gender attitudes are shaped through gendered contextualized processes.

Unfortunately, those interdisciplinary insights have rarely been integrated by quantitative scholars.Therefore, this research aims to refine and synthesize insights from diverse disciplines to develop a novel “gendered embeddedness” framework.

This framework argues that contextual forces explain the diversity in support for gender equality among non-Western migrants, albeit in gendered ways.

This framework is consequently subjected to rigorous empirical scrutiny by applying advanced statistical techniques such as multi-membership models to existing, newly-harmonized large-scale data that cover about 10,000 non-Western migrants.

Ultimately, this research lays bare when migrant groups culturally integrate and support gender equality and under what (gendered) conditions they do not.