The gendered cost of staying: How gender inequality increases female migration

Women increasingly migrate as primary movers, yet how gender inequality shapes this process remains unclear due to methodological limitations. Competing theories predict that greater gender equality should facilitate women's migration by loosening norms and expanding women's aspirations, whereas greater inequality may increase women's incentives to leave by raising the costs of staying or triggering relative deprivation. I overcome prior shortcomings by using two sources of exogenous variation in gender inequality (matrilineal kinship and variation in female property rights from colonial common- versus civil-law systems) as well as rich original survey data. Across all designs, higher gender inequality predicts stronger migration intentions. At the individual level, original surveys from Senegal, The Gambia, and Nigeria show violent experiences of gender inequality predict higher intentions, whereas more economic experiences such as gender discrimination do not. An embedded experiment further shows that gender equality at destination matters more for women exposed to violence. These patterns extend beyond intentions: in a representative survey of West African immigrants in Germany, women from more gender-unequal cultural traditions and from weaker property-rights regimes are overrepresented. Overall, results suggest a mechanism based on changes in the cost of staying rather than relative deprivation.