Return migration and gender inequality in the Indian technology industry

Elizabeth Jacobs , University of Connecticut

This paper examines gender inequality in the job mobility of Indian return migrants. Prior research suggests that foreign human capital gives returnees labor market advantages after moving home, but little work has examined whether men and women benefit equally from these payoffs. This remains an open question given the large body of work demonstrating gender inequality in hiring and promotions in corporate settings, and these dynamics are even more salient in contexts like India with considerable gender inequality in the workplace. I analyze a novel dataset of 1,591 time-varying cross-country employment histories from LinkedIn using logistic regression and survival analysis. I find that men are hired and promoted at higher rates than women, and subjective factors like gender carry more weight than objective factors like educational attainment. At the same time, a U.S. degree is associated with a boost in job mobility for women returnees, suggesting foreign educational credentials might mitigate some gender inequality. The paper offers novel insights into the gender dynamics of return migration. The paper recasts our understanding of the power of foreign degrees in contexts with high levels of gender inequality. Return migration is a crucial dimension of international migration that has long been understudied due to data constraints, and gender has often been overlooked in research on skilled migration. I analyze LinkedIn employment histories as digital data source to address these data limitations. I leverage the rich spatio-temporal information in these data to expand prior work on return migration to migrant career trajectories.

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 Presented in Session P4. Migration, Migrants, and Mobility