Abstract

Despite notable progress in recent years, gender discrimination and violence against women remains prevalent and persistent across the world, leading to suboptimal outcomes in terms of economic growth and development. Recent evidence indicates that, on the one hand, women who do not feel treated with respect and dignity have a higher incentive to migrate abroad. The likelihood that these migration intentions are turned into actual preparations, however, depends on more traditional determinants such as household income, network effects and family obligations. More intense gender imbalances in economic and political opportunities, on the other hand, prevent women from actually moving abroad. It remains, however, unclear whether women who leave their country because of gender discrimination migrate to countries where gender imbalances are less pronounced. Making use of unique individual level data, we empirically explore to what extent the location choice of female migrants can be explained by perceptions of gender discrimination among residents in potential host countries as well as attitudes towards women in those countries on top of the traditional determinants of immigrants' location choice. We perform extensive robustness checks to mitigate concerns about potential threats to identification posed by measurement error and unobservables.