# 3.3 Stocks by education level and gender

Tables 2 and 3 give the emigration stocks for 1990 and 2000, respectively . We distinguish total, low-skill and high-skill emigration stocks, the medium skilled can be easily obtained by substraction. Although the data set reveals speci...c information by country, we only report here data by country group. We consider income groups (following the World Bank classi...cation), regional groups and groups of developing countries as de...ned in the UN classi...cation, as well as a couple of groups of particular interest (OECD members, large countries with population above 75 million, SubSaharan Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, Middle East and Northern Africa and Islamic countries).

On the whole, we record 41.7 million immigrants aged 25+ and 58.2 million in 2000. The female share in adult OECD immigration was stable over the decade (50.6 percent in 1990 and 50.9 percent in 2000). These numbers are (for adults aged 25 and over) in line with the UNDP global numbers reported for the OECD countries (50.2 and 50.6 for these two years). However, the women’s share varies across education level. The share in unskilled migration is above 51 percent (it decreased from 51.5 to 51.1 percent during the decade). The share in skilled migration is below 50 percent but strongly increased between 1990 and 2000 (from 46.7 to 49.3 percent).

The number of skilled women immigrants increased by 74 percent (from 5.8 to about 10.1 million). The rise was important for developing countries (both middle and low-income) where the number of skilled women emigrants was multiplied by 2.1 (+110 percent). Such an increase is in women skilled emigration is observed in every source region and is mainly due to the fact that women’s rise in schooling level was more rapid than men’s rise (supply e¤ect). To a lesser extent, this also re‡ects the fact that skilled women are increasingly on the move. Indeed, as it will appear from the next section, the female skilled adult population increased by 67.9 percent at the world level and 83 percent in developing countries.

Figure 3 compares the average annual growth rates of women’s total and skilled emigration stock and men’s skilled emigration stock by region over the decade. In almost all regions the growth rate for skilled women is always bigger than for all women or skilled men. The evolution was particularly strong for migrants from the least developed countries, especially from low-income countries. The growth rate observed for Central and Southern Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa and Central America are particularly high.

Table 4 reports countries sending the largest stocks of migrants to the OECD. In absolute terms (number of educated emigrants), the largest countries are obviously strongly a¤ected by the brain drain. The elasticity of emigration stock to population size amounts to 63.2 percent, revealing that small countries are relatively more a¤ected that large countries. The ...ve largest diasporas (all education categories) originate from Mexico (6.434 million), United Kingdom (2.990 million), Italy (2.337 million), Germany (2.299 million) and Turkey (1.942 million). Eight other countries have diaspora above 1 million: India, the Philippines, China, Vietnam, Portugal, Ko13