While women overseas migrant workers are recruited into both skilled and unskilled jobs, the majority are concentrated in low status jobs at the lower end of the job hierarchy, where they suffer abuse. Women as human beings have human rights. Gender discrimination against women and girls is a fundamental denial of human rights. Such discrimination is both a cause of migration to meet survival needs and a consequence of rights violations throughout the migration process.

Poor and unskilled overseas migrant workers – women and men - face many similar types of problems throughout the migration process. But women migrant workers experience these in a qualitatively different way from men, and are often at a greater disadvantage. There are also some abuses perpetrated only or more commonly against women. Women are therefore disproportionately disadvantaged, despite their substantive contribution.