Migration, Household Activities and Gender Roles in Georgia

Theodore P. Gerber, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Karine Torosyan, Tbilisi State University

International migration has considerable potential to shape the gender roles that prevail within households in migrant-sending countries, via both "migrant-experience" and "migrant-absence" effects. We examine both types of possible effects of migration on gender-typed household activities for both men and women in the Republic of Georgia. Georgia is an ideal setting for the study of these mechanisms, because it has experienced high levels of labor out-migration in recent decades, it is a country where traditional norms predominate, and high-quality household survey data on migration, household tasks, and gender norms are available. We conduct a series of individual-level and household-level analyses predicting engagement in gender-activity household activities and also gender norms using data from the Georgia on the Move Survey, a 2008 household survey with oversamples of absent-migrant and return-migrant households.