Women migrants and refugees in the EU.

The paper seeks to identify issues specific to migrant women and refugees or which tend to affect them in different ways or on a different scale from male migrants due to gender, racial or other forms of discrimination. Discrimination can be defined “as the use of both different and unequal treatment of a group on the basis of a (real or imaginary) feature or groups of features that are socially construed as negative marks or stigmas compared with dominant players” (ISERES 2000). Migrant women confront legal, direct and indirect discriminations according to their class position, nationality, sexualisation and racialisation. Over time immigration legislation has discriminated less explicitly on gender grounds but it continues to have profound gender outcomes in terms of the preferential categories of immigration and the conditions under which entry, residence and employment are permitted.

Conference jointly organised by The European Commission and the OECD.