On the International Day of Migration COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology) highlighted a network focusing on women migrants and their contribution to European construction.
COST Action Women on the Move (WEMov) was initiated in September 2020 with the objective to unveil the presence and active participation of women migrants in the construction of Europe. WEMov gathers specialists of women’s migration across humanities who work together at making women, overlooked actresses of migration, come to light. Generally constructed as a male-dominated sphere, women were long excluded from the macro-narratives on migration. Indeed, until the 1980s women were rarely acknowledged in migration studies, often incorporated in group and family migration, and traces of women migrants in the past are still difficult to uncover. Today, even though women migrants make up for about 50% of the world migrants’ population, they are still often either portrayed as male migrants’ accompaniers, victims or economic burdens on receiving nations.
Women on the Move challenges these biased and incomplete perceptions of women migrants by revealing both their resources and the obstacles they face in migration processes. As such, it shows migration as a deeply gendered process.
EU Commissioner for Equality Helena Dalli endorses WEMov: Developing an EU Gender strategy is at the core of Commissioner Helena Dalli’s responsibilities. In a video endorsing COST Action Women on the Move, the Commissioner for Equality outlined the EU strategies to improve women migrants’ integration and inclusion.
Women on the Move is a collection of open access articles created by COST Action 19112. It focuses on women’s migration across time and disciplines, and it encourages the interplay between different approaches and periods. It welcomes a diversity of article types offered by Open Research Europe, including research articles, reviews, case studies, data notes, method articles, essays, and more, and facilitates the dissemination of all research outputs as openly and quickly as possible.These articles combine to unveil the presence and contribution of women migrants to the structuring and consolidation of sending and receiving nations, be they in the past or the present.
The objective of this collection is to make women migrants visible because migration has long been analysed from a gender-blind perspective and women’s presence made invisible by an overwhelming focus on men and families. Hence, this collection aims at showing women’s active participation in migration processes in the past as in the present, unrestricted to any specific discipline.
Additional information:
Source: Find more information and the video under: PR - COST, 18.12.2022 and PR-COST, 05.12.2022