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Abstract:  This paper examines gendered patterns of job mobility for return migrants in the Indian technology sector. I analyze hiring and promotion trajectories using LinkedIn employment histories as a novel data source to explore these questions. These data offer rich spatio-temporal information that allow for dynamic analysis of gender, job mobility and return migration. I analyze a dataset of 1,512 cross-country employment histories from LinkedIn using logistic regression analysis. I focus on Indian migrants who worked in the United States before moving back to India to work in the technology sector.

The results offer novel insights into the gender dynamics of return migration. I find that men are hired and promoted at higher rates than women, and I observe gendered returns to human capital for returnees in Indian technology companies. Subjective factors like gender carry more weight than objective factors like educational attainment for men, whereas women have mixed effects of human capital. The results suggest that foreign human capital might help mitigate some of the observed gender inequality in job mobility, while Indian credentials lower women’s chances of mobility.

The findings add a gender perspective to prior research on the returns to foreign human capital for return migrants, and reconsider the payoffs to educational attainment and labor market experience in transnational perspective. These results are especially salient in contexts with high levels of gender inequality, and the findings highlight policies that could increase the returns to migration, education and work experience, especially as DEI efforts expand within Indian tech companies and women’s educational attainment in India rapidly increases.

The Sociology Seminar Series for Trinity Term is convened by Ozan Aksoy and Zachary Parolin For more information about this or any of the seminars in the series, please contact sociology.secretary@nuffield.ox.ac.uk.