Where Have All the Young Women Gone? Gender-Specific Migration from East to West Germany
With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, direct migration from East to West Germany became possible. Between 1989 and 2007 more than 1.7 million, or 10 percent of the East's population, migrated to the West. A surprising and rarely investigated outcome of this migration process is that about 5...
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| Language: | English |
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Washington, DC: World Bank
2012
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| Online Access: | http://hdl.handle.net/10986/9253 |
| Summary: | With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, direct migration from East to West Germany became possible. Between 1989 and 2007 more than 1.7 million, or 10 percent of the East's population, migrated to the West. A surprising and rarely investigated outcome of this migration process is that about 55 percent of all (net) East-to-West migrants since 1989 have been female. Since more than half of the migrants were younger than 30 years old, this selective migration led to a tremendous deficit of females in the 18-to-29-year-old age group. This paper investigates the reasons for the gender-specific migration from East to West Germany. It identifies a considerable discrepancy in educational levels between women and men as the main cause for the missing-women phenomenon in East Germany. The female success in education, combined with an inadequate demand for highly skilled female labor in the East and a deficit of adequate local partners in terms of education are the main causes that make young women leave East Germany. |
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