Narratives on emigration of women from Nepal: is the state discourse keeping up with reality?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article critically examines Nepal’s migration policy discourse, which frames women migrants as inherently ‘vulnerable,’ requiring state protection. Central to this paternalistic narrative is a protection-through-prohibition approach that bans women from migrating for domestic work. In contrast, the lived experiences of women engaged in transnational labour migration expose not their vulnerability but the geopolitical fragility and regulatory limitations of the Nepali state. By juxtaposing the state’s policy narrative with counter-narratives articulated by women migrants and civil society actors, the paper reveals how both invoke values of care, protection, and responsibility, yet with fundamentally different outcomes. While the state’s approach reinforces gendered precarity, women’s strategies to circumvent migration bans emerge as acts of resistance against patriarchal state control. The paper explores three central questions: What drives the Nepali state's persistence with an ineffective prohibition policy? How do women migrants and civil society contest its gender-discriminatory logic? And what transformative potential do these counter-narratives hold for more equitable policymaking? Drawing on qualitative data from interviews across Nepal and three Gulf countries—Kuwait, Qatar, and the UAE—alongside policy and media analysis, the paper engages with feminist policy narrative theory to highlight the stakes of redefining ‘protection’ in global labour migration governance.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".