The Feminization of migration is a recent trend in which gendered patterns are changing and a higher rate of women are migrating for labor or marriage.[1] The percentage of female migrants world-wide has risen from 46.7 percent in 1960 to 49.6 percent as of 2005, according to United Nations statistics.[2] Research on the gender patterns of migration have increased substantially over the past several decades.[3][4] Some of the issues this research attends to are remittances and their economic impacts, family cohesion, racialization of migrants, human trafficking, gendered division of labor, and economic as well as educational opportunities.[4][5]
Contents |
Previous statistical evidence on migration patterns have not often been classified by gender.[5] Only recently have gendered statistics on migration been made available. In 1998, the United Nations Population Division first released a set of estimates from 1965 to 1990 that separated male and female migrants.[5] An increase in available data on migration revealing gender has led not only to the understanding that women play a large role in migration,[5] but that migration itself is a gendered phenomenon.[4]
Numerous factors influence a woman’s decision to migrate. An unexhaused list includes: financial distress, the prospect of financial gain, and hopes of preparing for the future; family dissolution, lack of direction and choice in the homeland, and to escape domestic constraints; in search of automony, and as a result of the social construction of prestige, achievement, adventure and fulfillment.[1]
A more recent shift in migration patterns relates to an increase in the migration of single women and partnered women who migrate without their families.[1] Due to stipulations present within contract-based employment, worker families are prevented from permanently settling and as a result, women are migrating alone.[1]
Much of the work made available to women migrants is gendered and concentrated in the entertainment industry, health services, and most of all in the domestic services.[1]
The gendered division of labor includes reproductive labor, which refers to work performed within the domestic or private sphere and which helps to sustain a household (e.g. cleaning, cooking, child care and rearing, etc.).[1] Reproductive labor enables paid, productive labor to take place.[1] Reproductive labor is typically performed by women and, as dominant gender discourses are threaded throughout labor ideologies, domestic work has historically been considered a “natural” part of a woman’s duties and identity.[1] As such, feminized labor has typically been considered “unskilled” and, thus, has gone unpaid.[1]
As noted by Filipino popular culture studies professor Roland Tolentino, when women migrate to perform domestic labor, “unpaid home labor in the domestic sphere becomes paid labor in international spaces.”[1]
Migrant workers are racialized via discursive and material avenues in three primary ways:[1]
Discursive and material processes of racialization influence representations of migrant workers, the venues and methods used to recruit them, and the conditions under which they will be expected to work.[1]
Since the 1970s, economic growth in East Asia has spurred workers to migrate from poorer Southeast Asian countries, like the Philippines and Indonesia, to more wealthy nations and areas, like Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan, in the search for employment.[1] As a result of globalization, women are migrating in increasing numbers and entering the domestic services, a phenomenon which scholars refer to as "the global nanny chain" or "the international division of reproductive labor".[1]
Not all migratory flows come from poorer regions, however. In the Philippines, for example, flows often come from more developed regions.[1] Thailand has seen an increase in feminized migration from higher classes as well. Once practiced exclusively by the wealthy elite, the 1960s marked a time when middle-class Sino-Thai families began to increasingly send daughters overseas in pursuit of higher education.[6]
Some theorists assert that migration flows from Third World to First World nations occur as a result of First World imperialism which has depleted natural resources, and increased debt and poverty in the Third World.[7] First World financial institutions like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), for example, require borrowing countries to follow contracted regulations detailed in structural adjustment programs (SAPs), and these programs hinder the sovereignty of poorer nations because they control governments’ use and allocation of loaned funds and include stipulations which require government to reduce State provisions of social services.[7] As noted by Grace Chang, imperialism extracts "land, products, labor, and lives."[7] She illuminates an alternative perspective on migration in which First World imperialism “forces many people in the Third World to migrate to follow their countries’ wealth."[7]