March 21, 2025 | News | Award

DGD Best Paper Award for Athina Anastasiadou

Migration researcher Athina Anastasiadou has won the Best Paper Award of the German Society for Demography (DGD). Anastasiadou received the award on March 20 at the DGD's annual conference for her paper "Gender Differences in the Migration Process: A Narrative Literature Review" in the journal Population and Development Review.

Athina Anastasiadou, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR) in Rostock, has won the 2025 Best Paper Award of the German Society for Demography (DGD). © MPIDR/Schulz

In this analysis, Athina Anastasiadou and her colleagues summarized and analyzed the results of 170 studies on gender differences in the migration process based on quantitative research and various migration data sources. The study shows that women are less successful than men in realizing their migration plans. Moreover, the research findings cast a new light on the conventional narrative of the "feminization of migration" and suggest that female migrants face double discrimination in the labor market. They are discriminated against because they are women and because of their status as migrants. The analysis shows that most previous studies have focused mainly on the Global North as a destination country and that migration patterns to and from the Global South have not been sufficiently explored. Gender differences play a crucial role in studying migration for demographic projections. "The main contribution of our work is to highlight the research that has already been done to understand the relationship between gender and migration. At the same time, we want to call for improved data collection by gender and encourage demographers to rethink their concept of 'gender' when studying migration as a component of demographic change that is determined not by biological characteristics but by social norms and roles," says Athina Anastasiadou.

Athina Anastasiadou is a researcher at the MPIDR in the Department of Migration and Mobility, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Groningen and is participant of the International Max Planck Research School for Population, Health and Data Science (IMPRS-PHDS), a doctoral program that combines demography, epidemiology and data science.