RETHINKING GENDER, RETHINKING MIGRATION: Putting gender into the migration-development nexus. A micro level case study of Sri Lanka

Be it an indigenously or exogenously driven process, gender roles play an important partin the mechanisms affecting changes in a society. It has been theorized that migration createsa real challenge to the persistent patriarchal structure and gender stereotypes withinand outside the households of migrant workers in their country of origin. Otherwise usingdata from an empirically designed longitudinal ethnographic research, this paper arguesthat migration hardly brings out stable or enduring structural changes in the traditionalgender roles in women’s lives at the micro level. Instead, migration brings forth a set ofsimultaneous interplays into gender roles. Particularly, the change in migrant women’sroles within households is not perceived to affect the overall micro level social structure.It is simply a partial and short-term outcome of an exogenous process. Migration-inducedchanges in gender roles arbitrarily shake, strain and disrupt the existing social, culturaland institutional foundations on the micro level. The study finds strong evidence that thelong-term impact of arbitrary changes in gender roles causes a number of micro socialissues. The consequences of these issues insidiously impair the long-term developmentalcapabilities of migrant households in the country of origin.