Globalization is changing migration and the roles of men and women, said experts on migration from the United Nations and universities in New York, Japan, the Philippines, Indonesia and Hong Kong on 4 December 2006. The face-to-face meeting, which used monitors, microphones and high-speed Internet, was sponsored by the United Nations University, the UN Division for the Advancement of Women and Keio University in Japan.

Globalization had lifted a billion peasants out of poverty in India and China, said Dr. W. Scott Thompson of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, adding that there was "too little globalization, not too much". Speaking from the Asian Institute of Management in the Philippines, he described globalization as the "the legal, economic, political and cultural knitting together of world programmes and regimes, irrespective of ideology and military". Globalization had created hope for people around the world; every water buffalo herder in Andra Pradesh, India, saw hundreds of advertisements for computer classes at night school, and "the smartest will find ways to go", he said. The biggest challenge, Mr. Thompson added, is to distribute the benefits of globalization more evenly, and one way to achieve that is to make computer and internet access much more widely available. He pointed out that, in relative terms, a teenager in Ghana spends 100 times more than a teen in the United States spends on access to a computer.

Asia was one of the most active regions regarding cross-border movement of women, who generally worked in unskilled, labour-intensive and badly paid jobs, like domestic care, said Fanny M. Cheung, speaking from the Chinese University in Hong Kong. With women often staying away for many months, infidelity has become common for the men they leave behind. Ms. Cheung noticed a trend toward a new patriarchal attitude in China, under which women are advised to stay at home, rather than compete with men for scarce jobs. Replacing the common image in China of women as "holding up half the sky", this leads to a perception of women as sexual commodities, where it was "better to marry well than to study well", said Ms. Cheung. With many men travelling between Hong Kong and China for work as truck drivers, cooks or executives, cross-border relationships are growing, and many men are taking on mistresses or second wives, she added. Governments must cope with this by initiating strategies to stop the spread of HIV/AIDS among sex workers, their male clients and the wives of these men, said Ms. Cheung.

Member States at the High-Level Dialogue on International Migration and Development, held on 14 and 15 September 2006 at UN Headquarters, agreed that women are often able to improve their lives through migration, said Dr. Hania Zlotnik, Director of the United Nations Population Division. Speaking from New York, she said that women migrants often hire other women to replace them in their households, and that these women can play important roles in administering the remittances and making important decisions for the family. At the same time, she said that women are probably exposed to greater risks than men when they migrate, particularly because of the risk of falling victim to human trafficking. However, because women migrants had good opportunities abroad, Ms. Zlotnik said "we will see many more migrants in the future".

Also speaking form New York, Dr. Collen Thouez, Chief of the United Nations Institute for Training and Research, said that in 2003 the United Arab Emirates issued an average of 300 visas per day, and that the average household in that country had three domestic workers. While many women who migrated enjoy freedom and power that they might not have had at home, she said others experience "consistent, flagrant and egregious" human rights abuses. Responding to these abuses, Bangladesh had banned migration for domestic workers to the Middle East in 1998, but lifted the ban in 2005. The key to preventing such abuse, said Ms. Thouez, is pre-departure training so that women migrants know where to turn to if they encounter problems in their destination countries, and stronger representation for migrants' interests in host countries.

Responding to a question from the audience, Ms. Zlotnik said that in some Asian countries where the male population is larger than the female population because of migration, men with little education are increasingly having trouble finding mates, while highly educated women have the same problem. This has led to increasing demand for female sex workers, putting poor women at higher risk. She also pointed to a "sea-change" in gender relations, where women are becoming better educated and men are losing ground.