ABSTRACT
After a long silence, gender is beginning to feature in the analysis of labour migration (Boyle and Halfacree 1995; Green 1997). Recent quantitative analyses, however, pose something of a paradox. While most theoretical approaches and much qualitative analysis suggest that women will gain less from migration than men, some quantitative analyses in Britain (Fielding and Halford 1993; Fielding 1995; Savage 1988) and the United States (Cooke and Bailey 1996) suggest that women can do as well as men out of labour market migration. In this chapter I attempt to untangle this paradox, concentrating on moves to London and the South East of England in the 1980s and early 1990s. Fielding and Halford (1993) found that flows to this region in 1971-81 were relatively to the advantage of women’s careers compared with those of men and that promotion to managerial posts through migration to the South East between 1981 and 1991 was also more common for women than for men (Fielding 1995). Women appear as firmly footed on the London and South East ‘escalator’ (Fielding 1992) as men.
