ABSTRACT
Women are travelling out of South Korea (hereafter Korea), Japan and China for very different reasons than those that sent them into diaspora only twenty years ago. From the mid-1980s onward there has been a rising trend of women leaving their country to experience life overseas either as tourists or students, eventually surpassing the number of men engaging in foreign travel. Now, 80% of Japanese people studying abroad are women (Kelsky 2001; Ono and Piper 2004), an estimated 60% of Koreans studying abroad are women, and more than half of the Chinese entering higher education overseas are women (IIE 2006; HESA 2006). This phenomenon is part of a larger trend described as the “feminization of migration” yet there remains a striking lack of analysis on the gender dimension (World Bank 2006). Today women are signifi cant and active participants in the increased scale, diversity and transition in the nature of international migration. Studying abroad has become a major vehicle for entry into Western countries (Lucas 2005) and East Asia continues to be the largest sending region every year. In 2005, 53,000 Koreans, 42,000 Japanese and 62,000 Chinese moved to US institutions of higher education; 4,000 Koreans, 6,000 Japanese and 53,000 Chinese moved to UK institutions of higher education. Studying abroad has become a common career move for relatively affl uent women in their twenties. These new generations of women, who depart from the usual track of marriage, are markers of contemporary transnational mobility, constituting a new kind of diaspora, a “knowledge diaspora.”
