Global Migration of Professionals in the 21st Century Disaggregated by Gender, Education and Industry

Tom Theile , Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research
Aliakbar Akbaritabar, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR), and Institute of Sociology and Demography, University of Rostock
Elizabeth Jacobs, University of Connecticut
Daniela Perrotta, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research
Carolina Coimbra Vieira, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research
Emilio Zagheni, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research

This paper provides timely and detailed global estimates of trends in professional migration from 1996 to 2024. We leverage a novel dataset of over 600 million LinkedIn user profiles to provide new insights into gender differentials in global migration flows and how these flows are shaped by industry and education in different migration corridors. Beyond offering new estimates, this paper presents data and analysis that enrich research on the feminization of migration with greater global scale and sociodemographic detail. Preliminary results indicate steady growth in the global population of professional migrants, with disruptions associated with the global financial crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic. Our data indicate that the top destinations in 2024 were the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, France, and Australia. We identify key bilateral flows, such as India to the United States, and countries nearing gender parity in the migrant stock, like Australia. We correlate LinkedIn-based estimates with census data from IPUMS-International and Eurostat, and propose methods to assess and correct biases using weights generated from official statistics.

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 Presented in Session 36. Composition of International Migration