Emigration of women from Russia: channels of departure and potential

Sergey V. Ryazantsev
Marina Tkachenko

Russian women became very active participants of migration processes. In a whole about 790 thousands of women have left Russia for abroad and about 60 thousands of women have left for temporary earnings abroad recently. However the given data are only “visible part of ice-mountain”, because great part of women leave abroad as tourists and stay there to work illegally. There are several basic channels which Russian women use to leave abroad: regular, semiofficial and illegal. The first one is very young women at the age of from 16 till 20, as a rule without or not finished their education; the second one is young women at the age of from 25 till 35. All the women who leave Russia for abroad taking into account motivation and migration aims may be divided into the next groups. The first group is women who leave to work abroad in their profession by economic reasons primarily. The second group – is women whose main aim is getting married foreigner. The third group is women who dream to see the world and get if it is probably extra (“easy” in their mind) earnings. Fourth group – girls and women who wanted to work in sex sector at once. IOM data say that no less than 300-400 thousand girls from Russia are work in entertainment sector and sex services sector in different countries. We made a sociological survey of women – potential migrants (selection is 400 persons). About 40% of women-respondents said about their hypothetic opportunity of leaving abroad to work there. About a half of women from this proportion is “active potential of migration”, i.e. they are ready to leave in the nearest future and made real steps for this. It may be expected that no more than 10-12% of all the women-respondents can realize their active potential of migration.