Massive labor migration in Georgia began in the 1990s as a result of the difficult economic situation in country. The intra-border conflicts in Abkhazia and South Ossetia proved devastating to the struggling Georgian economy, which had collapsed with the breakdown of the Soviet Union. A large part of the population of what had been one of the USSR’s richest and most prosperous republics found themselves jobless and impoverished. Nor did employment guarantee prosperity—salaries, especially in the public sector, were low. The private sector, where wages were higher, could not provide a sufficient number of jobs to satisfy the demand for employment. It is thus hardly surprising that a significant part of the Georgian population resorted to emigration in order to survive economic hardship[1].

During the first years of Georgian independence, labor migration from Georgia consisted predominantly of males and was directed toward Russia, where Georgian migrant laborers were occupied mostly in construction and petty trade (Zaionchkovskaia 1994). A decade later, Dershem and Khoperia (2004), based on a quantitative study conducted in Georgia, and Tsuladze (2005), based on the results of Georgia’s 2002 census, suggested that labor migration from Georgia was still predominantly male.

So far, studies of Georgian labor emigration have not paid much attention to the increasing proportion of female labor emigration from Georgia[2]. This paper attempts to fill this gap in the literature by providing evidence of a trend toward increasing female labor emigration from Georgia, indicating that even remote areas of the country have been integrated into the global market with its demand for domestic jobs.

The present paper is based on a case study of labor emigration from Tianeti, a small, mountainous community inhabited by ethnic Georgians. Tianeti is an interesting case in that prior to the late 1990s—early 2000s, the community had no experience of large-scale international migration, but since then has been actively involved in migratory processes (Zurabishvili, Tavberidze, and Zurabishvili 2009:19). Unlike other migrant-sending communities in Georgia, emigration from Tianeti is overwhelmingly directed toward Western Europe, Israel, and North America (which are relatively new destinations for Georgian labor emigrants), and is pre­dominantly female