I recently got promoted at work. I felt very proud and excited, until reality hit hard. Before signing the new contract, my manager informed me that the company wouldn’t be able to sponsor a Skilled Worker visa when my current one – a 2-year Graduate visa – expires this December. Which means that if I can’t find another way to stay in the UK, I’ll have no choice but to leave.
As an Italian woman who moved to London in the wake of Brexit, trying to build a career in a country that’s not my own, that uncertainty keeps me awake at night. What will happen to me?
Thankfully, I do have one option. I’ve been living with my English boyfriend for over two years, which theoretically makes me eligible for an Unmarried Partner visa. That would allow me to live and work in the UK for another two years and nine months, but at a personal cost. Don’t get me wrong – I love my partner. But the idea of tying my right to stay in England to a romantic relationship feels deeply unsettling.
When I shared my situation with Professor Michaela Benson, she immediately turned up her nose at it. “This is a problematic route to follow,” she told me, “because it places you in a situation of dependency.” Prof. Benson is a sociologist who has spent the last two decades studying British migration to the EU. Through the process, she also became familiar with the other side of the coin – EU citizens moving to the UK – and started researching the experiences of EU citizens going through Brexit.
“The initial plan was to do research with Europeans newly arriving in the UK, but their numbers dropped off a cliff,” she said. “While in June 2016 EU nationals made up 70% of all migrants to the UK, by December 2023 that figure had dropped to 10%, overtaken by migrants from India and China and those arriving through humanitarian routes.”
Behind these numbers isn’t a gender-neutral situation. Although getting residency in the UK is becoming drastically hard for all EU citizens, regardless of their gender, we can’t ignore that the Brexit spiral disproportionately affects women, for a number of reasons.
Shaping UK borders through the gender pay gap
First of all, EU immigrants are now primarily assessed based on their economic contribution and are generally expected to earn more than the average UK resident. However, in this process, the UK Government fails to consider that the gender pay gap remains a significant issue.
According to data released by the Office for National Statistics in October 2024, the pay gap between men and women in the UK has been narrowing over time, yet as of April 2024, women still earned 7% less per hour than men. At that time, the median full-time hourly wage stood at £19.24 for men and £17.88 for women. Considering a standard full-time schedule (40 hours per week, 52 weeks per year), this translates to an annual salary of £37,190.40 for women and £40,019.20 for men.
To qualify for a Skilled Worker visa, applicants “usually need to be paid the standard salary rate of at least £38,700 per year, or the ‘going rate’ for your job, whichever is higher,” according to GOV.UK. While this threshold is above the average earnings for women, it remains below the average for men, highlighting an inherent gender bias in how income thresholds are applied.
“Women earning significantly less than their male counterparts is not just a barrier to obtaining a Skilled Worker visa,” Prof. Benson explained. “It also affects EU women who are trying to stay in the UK through different routes, such as Graduate or Family visas. The amount of money you need to pay in order to stay just goes up and up, and if you don’t earn enough, you simply can’t afford it.” In this way, the gender pay gap silently shapes who can cross the UK borders.
When Family visas become traps for women
If EU immigrants aren’t classified as high-skilled workers, they may still move to the UK through alternative routes, such as studying or joining family members. The UK offers several types of Family visas, depending on the situation: to care for a child living in the UK, to join a parent as a dependent child or to receive long-term care from a close relative who is a permanent resident. You can also apply as the partner or spouse of a British or Irish citizen, or of someone from the EU (provided they began living in the UK before 1 January 2021).
However, the family visa route comes with major challenges. “This route has always been problematic because it places you in a relationship of dependency with your partner and creates new inequalities within the family,” Prof. Benson said. “What happens, for example, if you break up? Would you be out on the street? This is a real fear for some women.”
The situation is even more complicated for women experiencing domestic abuse. “If you’re in a violent relationship but your right to stay in the UK depends on a Family visa, this can stop you from leaving your abuser,” Prof. Benson said. A Family visa can lock women into relationships of legal and financial dependency – something a young woman moving to the UK for a better life doesn’t usually anticipate. “To have your legal status rely on someone else, who is usually a man, is pretty transformational,” the UK sociologist commented.
The list of situations in which EU women are disproportionately impacted by Brexit compared to men goes on and on. Take, for instance, the rule that if visa holders spend more than six months outside the UK, their eligibility for permanent residency can be jeopardised. “There are many legitimate reasons why people spend significant amounts of time abroad, including caregiving for elderly relatives,” noted Professor Benson. “And who is usually responsible for unpaid care work, if not women?”
And again, the Youth Mobility Scheme comes with restrictions. “While it doesn’t explicitly require you to be single, to remain eligible for this scheme you can’t have children. So imagine being a young woman who comes to the UK, meets someone and gets pregnant. That would be a violation of your visa.” This scheme prevents immigrants from starting families in the UK, but it affects women disproportionately.
Migration research leaves gender and race behind
All this highlights how structural gender inequalities manifest within migration systems. “When we talk about migration, the migrant in the mind of policymakers is usually a working man. It’s very simple. Migration systems are not built to facilitate the movement of anyone other than men – and Brexit is a clear demonstration of that,” said Prof. Benson.
However, there’s currently no available research to support this. “At the moment, we’re in a time lag. It takes a long time for academic work to be conducted and published, and the most recent research still focuses largely on people who were in the UK before Brexit.”
Even prior to that change, however, there was limited research on Europeans living in the UK, as they weren’t considered migrants but ‘mobile citizens’, who enjoyed equal rights to freedom of movement across the EU and EEA (European Economic Area).
The UK sociologist also pointed out that research funding tends to follow the government’s priorities. For instance, in the early 2000s, the UK invested heavily in studying the large influx of people from Eastern Europe – particularly from Poland – due to concerns about its impact on British society. “This problem-oriented approach, which responds to what the state thinks is important, has always shaped migration research, in the UK as well as in Europe, as proved during the Mediterranean migrant crisis in the mid-2010s,” Prof. Benson explained. The direct consequence is that, even when it comes to Brexit-related research, the primary lens is nationality. “Gender-related issues may be identified within that framework, but they’re rarely placed at the centre of the research.”
And what about race, class, age – and other intersectional aspects of identity that can further complicate the personal experiences of EU migrant women? If you’re a Black Muslim European woman with a working-class background, your experience is likely very different from that of a white French man with a University degree – let alone if you’re disabled as well.
So, if EU women are becoming second-class migrants per se, people whose skin is not white can be accused of being migrants even when they’re not, and the consequences those prejudices create are deeply insidious. “It’s worth bearing in mind that even among European migrants, there are hierarchies,” Prof. Benson concluded. “If white European populations were shocked by the racism that accompanied Brexit, for Black Europeans, Roma and other racial minorities, that was nothing new. Racism hasn’t suddenly emerged in British life – it’s been there for a very long time.”
This article is part of the series Women On The Move. Fleeing, Fighting, Forgotten. To read more inspiring stories of everyday women making a real difference in the world, be sure to check out the latest edition of Wempower magazine, or listen to our podcast.
