More Kerala women landing overseas for jobs, concerns over nature of jobs remain

Fifty-one-year-old Rehna Khalid, an engineer from Thrissur, embarked on a journey to the UAE in 1996-97, stepping into a world vastly different from today’s Gulf. The professional landscape was far from welcoming, especially for women in engineering—a field where their presence was nearly non-existent. Rehna faced constant discouragement when it came to pursuing the career she had worked hard for with her engineering degree.

Even as a second-generation Gulf migrant—she was born in Doha, Qatar, where her parents lived in the early 1970s before returning to Kerala in 1976—her experience in the 1990s underscored the deep challenges women faced in breaking into professions abroad.

“Nurses were practically the only women professionals migrating for jobs in those days, with a handful of teachers as exceptions. When I started my job in a factory, I was the only woman in such a position. Everyone around me kept suggesting I switch to something more ‘suitable’, like front office management or a clerical role—if I was so insistent on working. The ideal they had for me was to be a homemaker with a working husband. As a woman, I had to work twice as hard as my male colleagues just to prove my worth,” Rehna recalls.

“In those days, women typically migrated to the Gulf on dependent visas, either through their husbands or, in some cases, their fathers. That was just the norm—no one was willing to take the responsibility or invest money to bring women from Kerala on independent visas. When I tried to sponsor our children, I was met with questions like, ‘Why don’t you make them dependents of your husband? That would be easier.’”

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Bushara, 53, from Edavanakkad in Ernakulam district, made a life-altering decision in 1999. At just 28 years of age, and a single mother after her husband abandoned her and their two daughters, she migrated to Dubai. Struggling to make ends meet in Kochi by doing menial jobs, an agent offered her a visa to work as a housemaid—a chance that ultimately transformed her and her children’s lives.

“I had never travelled outside Kerala before, and 1999 marked the first time I boarded a flight, landing in Sharjah. Leaving behind my two kids, aged 7 and 5, was the hardest part. Although I had siblings, I had no choice but to leave my children in the care of an orphanage for the first three years. It was only after that, when I could support my brother, and he took my kids in after his marriage,” recalls Bushara.

“Every job has its own dignity, they say, but working as a housemaid—especially in a foreign country where you don’t know the language or customs—feels like hell. After all, who wants to wash someone else’s dishes and clean their toilets? But it was the life Allah chose for me, and I’ve built the comfort I enjoy today from it. After seven or eight years, with my employers being kind and supportive, I managed to learn new skills and eventually transitioned to a job as a shop manager,” says Bushara.

Bushara’s elder daughter, a chemical engineer, now lives in Canada with her husband, while her younger daughter is a biotechnologist. After spending nearly 24 years in the Gulf, Bushara returned to Kerala last year and has since settled near her siblings and their families. One thing she remained steadfast about was her decision not to remarry, despite pressure from her family, including her children.

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Shilpa Soosan George, 42, had just finished a night shift at a hospital in Kuwait City when we spoke on the phone. She has spent the last twelve years in the Gulf. It was in 2012 that she migrated, leaving her husband and two children at their home in Kottayam, where Alex Mathew managed both their families. After four years, she brought him to Kuwait, where he now works as a driver for a company.

“I was working at a hospital back home when we got married, and he was an ambulance driver. Life was challenging with our modest incomes, and then this opportunity came along. At the time, our second child was just 10 months old, so Alex had to stop working to take care of her. Once the kids started school and our situation improved, I brought him here too. Now, we’re settled here as a family, while our kids stay with our parents. Both of our parents live in two houses within the same compound that we bought,” she shares.

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These are the varied stories of women who have migrated to the GCC countries from Kerala over the past three decades. While migration from Kerala has a long history, the movement of women is relatively recent. Nurses and other healthcare professionals have been migrating since the 1970s, but other female professionals have only begun to do so more recently. Today, with social and family dynamics evolving in response to global trends, women's presence is increasingly felt everywhere. However, in the GCC countries, the most vulnerable social category remains domestic workers.

The feminisation of international migration over the past two decades has highlighted gender concerns in managing labour outflows. Women migrants now constitute 135 million, or 48.1%, of the global international migrant stock, with their share of migrant workers estimated at 41.6% in 2017.

Women and migration

Understanding migration through a gender lens is crucial, as most women migrant workers occupy roles traditionally associated with gender, such as domestic and care work. These jobs are often undervalued and poorly compensated, leading to heightened vulnerabilities for migrant women. In Gulf countries, lower female labour force participation and a cultural aversion to placing elderly relatives in care facilities further escalate the demand for domestic workers to handle household and caregiving responsibilities.

“While Gulf migration is often male-dominated, women’s migration from India and Kerala has grown significantly and deserves attention. Initially, women migrated as nurses and domestic workers, but today, they are employed in diverse sectors such as education, finance, IT, retail, hospitality, healthcare, beauty services, and entertainment. This migration is often driven by a desire for financial security and to support their families. Women migrants play a crucial role in India’s and Kerala’s development story, yet they are not acknowledged as a primary economic actor and their critical contributions are often overlooked by society,” observes Dr Divya Balan, Assistant Professor & Area Chair, International Studies, of FLAME University, Pune.

“Besides, their migration experiences are uniquely gendered and influenced by patriarchal family structures and expectations. While migration may increase their autonomy and redefine their gender roles, aspirations, and worldview, it also leads to social stigma, especially in terms of being absent from their expected caregiving responsibilities for the stayed-behind family,” added Dr. Divya.

“With more women migrating to the Gulf and beyond, there is a need for more public and policy conversations on the psychosocial impacts of their migration, especially the emotional strain of remote mothering and caregiving while surviving in a foreign country. Likewise, the challenges women face upon returning, such as reintegration or re-entering into the local labour market and family roles, as well as their limited access to welfare and support networks, need immediate attention,” Divya told The Federal.

According to the fourth edition of the Kerala Migration Survey published in 2024, the number of Kerala emigrants in different countries amount to 2.2 million. This is significant, as there has been a reversing trend in migration following the COVID pandemic. The latest edition of the Kerala Migration Survey projects an increase of approximately 40,000 emigrants in the post-COVID period, which it attributes to the new phenomenon of student migration.

The proportion of female emigrants has increased from 15.8 per cent in 2018 to 19.1 per cent in 2023. Female migration has further seen a shift from GCC countries to Europe and other Western nations as destination countries, accounting for 40.5 per cent. However, for men, this figure stands at 14.6 per cent. In terms of education, 71.5 per cent of female migrants were found to have completed degree-level education as opposed to only 34.7 per cent of male emigrants. Male migrants continue to dominate emigration from Kerala, with the gap between male and female migrants being narrowest in Kottayam and widest in Malappuram.

The KMS 2023 reveals the distribution of emigrants from Kerala across different countries of residence categorised by gender. Among the GCC countries, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) stood out with the highest percentage of emigrants among both males (40.2 percent) and females (31.6 percent), totalling 38.6 per cent. Saudi Arabia followed with 18.8 per cent of male emigrants and 8.8 per cent of female emigrants, contributing to a total of 16.9 per cent. Among the non-GCC countries, the United Kingdom attracted 4.0 per cent of male emigrants and 14.7 per cent of female emigrants, constituting about 6.0 per cent of the emigrants from Kerala. The United States of America, Canada, and Australia closely followed, hosting 2.2 per cent, 2.5 per cent and 1.5 per cent of the emigrants from Kerala respectively. Overall, GCC countries accounted for 80.5 per cent of emigrants and non-GCC countries accommodated 19.5 per cent of emigrants in 2023.

Although there is an extensive body of literature on international labour flows from Kerala, a region with a long-standing history of labour outflows, studies specifically focusing on women workers are somewhat scarce. In the light of significant changes in the migration landscape over the past decade, including a growing number of women migrating for work, often without their families, it is important for policymakers to understand the dynamics of international migration of women from Kerala for employment.

Heightened vulnerability

A study conducted by the Kochi-based research organisation Centre for Science and Environment Studies (CSES) on the migration of women domestic workers from Kerala to the Gulf reveals that all GCC countries exclude migrant domestic workers from their labour laws, heightening their vulnerability. One argument for this exclusion is that domestic work cannot be regulated in the same way as other occupations without infringing on the privacy of the employer’s household and the dignity of their family. However, there have been recent efforts in many GCC countries to introduce legislation aimed at regulating domestic work, although the effectiveness and scope of such legislation vary.

The CSES study calls for an urgent need to enhance data collection on labour migration, encompassing both inflows and outflows pointing out that currently, international migration policymaking is hindered by a lack of sufficient gender-disaggregated data on labour migration. Such data are essential to protect rights and prevent exploitation, assess the contributions of migrant women to the economies of both origin and destination countries, and support their return and reintegration.