Gender and mobility: Qatar's highly skilled female migrants in context

Very little is known about the life experiences of highly skilled female migrants and almost nothing about them outside of Western contexts. This paper attempts to address this knowledge gap by examining the experiences of highly skilled migrant women working in the Persian Gulf monarchy of Qatar. Drawing on in-depth interviews with a sample of highly skilled migrants in Qatar, the paper examines the experiences of highly skilled migrant women in the Gulf in order to understand how their experiences compare with male counterparts, and the ways in which these experiences are gendered as a result of marital and family status. It also examines how the kafala labor sponsorship system differentially conditions highly skilled female versus male labor market participation, thereby producing very different professional and personal migration experiences. Finally, the paper highlights the importance of intersectionality on migrants’ lived experiences, as it finds that social, cultural, national, and geographical categories are important when thinking about the mobility of highly skilled women.

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Published in: Migration and Development
License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
See article on publisher's website: https://dx.doi.org/10.1080/21632324.2020.1723216