Studies on migrants' lives, career aspirations, and access to work and further education within the European context have until recently excluded the research and narratives of minority migrant women. Nevertheless, the body of literature shows a trend of the feminization of international migration since the 1970s. This possible gap in knowledge inquired here provides a perspective of understanding to challenge educational and employment policies. The focus of this paper presentation is to identify affirmative action, referring to employment equity, among immigrant women. The geographical scope of the study empirically and theoretically is Finland, Europe and beyond. The study will search answers to the following questions:

(1) What are the migrant women's experiences in education and employment in Europe?

(2) What are the future challenges of migrant women's employment in Europe?

Access to and management of mobility is gendered and dependent on historical, economic and institutional contexts (see Kõll 2007). Mobility as a strategy can be empowering and an instrument for social innovation and agency as well as for promoting human and social capital, if the policies are mutually designed instead of purely from national and receiving countries' interests.  Some social problematic phenomena, such as trafficking in women, are preventing mobility and freedom. Additionally, migration can also reflect increased dependencies on social security aid and proliferation of precarious jobs (Lasonen, Teräs et al. 2011; Teräs, Lasonen et al. 2010).

A fair bit of research has been carried out on migrant women in the European labour force. However, this was not always self evident. Whereas women were long absent from studies of migration, and men remained the universal focus, migrant women became more visible only from the 1970s onwards, after the restriction of mass economic immigration, and after the implementation of family reunion policies in many European countries. But in the early years of the 21^st century, the number of research focusing solely on women has increased dramatically, and according to ENAR 2010 researchers point to the growing gender diversity of migratory flows, and the gender-specific division of employment sectors among others (ENAR, 2010). 

Also, the findings by Rubin et al (2008) show for instance that migrant women have a double disadvantage in the labour market: of being both a migrant and a woman.    This double disadvantage arises from an environment of unequal opportunities in the labour market, which negatively affects both women and migrants. This means for instance that women migrants have been shown to have more difficulties integrating into the labour market than both native-born women and migrant men. Migrant women, in a sense, face a double battle; first to migrate and integrate as foreign-born people in their host country, and then to overcome the gender bias in the labour market as well as in other areas of social, political and economic life.

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