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Analytical Framework for Understanding Womens Migration

Rhacel Salazar Parreas, Professor of American Studies and Sociology at Brown

University

In the literature on gender and migration, scholars frequently assert that migration

is a somewhat liberating experience for women.1 Such an assertion has been made

primarily by U.S. based scholars who write about migrant women from various

countries including Mexico, the Dominican Republic, and India. This argument has

also been made in reference to both professional migrant women such as nurses

and low-wage migrant workers such as domestic workers. Basically, the argument

goes that, women make greater gains in status, autonomy and resources relative to

men in migration. On what basis do scholars assert that the status of women

improve upon migration? First, they argue that womens greater income earning

power leads not only to their greater economic contributions to the family but it

also translates to more decision making authority in the household for women.

Second, they assert that women have greater access to the public sphere upon

migration because for instance they are the ones dealing with teachers at schools

and doctors in hospitals when tending to the needs of children.

One of the foremost scholars on womens migration Saskia Sassen is actually in

agreement with this perspective. Her summary of the literature is worth citing at

length for its explanation of how and why women are liberated upon migration. As

she states, There is a large literature showing that immigrant womens regular

wage work and improved access to other public realms has an impact on their

gender relations, as it allows them to gain greater personal autonomy and

independence... Women gain more control over budgeting and other domestic

decisions and greater leverage in requesting help from men in domestic chores.

Also, their access to public services and other public resources gives them a chance

to become incorporated in the mainstream society and they are often the ones in

the household who mediate in this process Besides the relatively greater

empowerment of women in the household associated with wage employment, there

is a second important outcome: their greater participation in the public sphere and

their possible emergence as public actors.2 If we are to look closely at the logic of

1 See classic book by Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, Gendered Transitions (Berkeley,

CA: University of California Press, 1994); Gloria Gonzalez Lopez, Erotic Journeys:

Mexican Americans and their Sex Lives (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press,

2005); Sheba George, When Women Come First (Berkeley, CA: University of

California Press, 2005); Singer, Audrey, and Greta Gilbertson, "'The Blue Passport':

Gender and the social process of naturalization among Dominican immigrants." In

Gender and U.S. Immigration: Contemporary Trends, Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, ed.,

pp. 359-378, (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003). 2 Saskia Sassen, Cities in a World Economy 3rd edition (Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine

Forge Press, 2006), pp. 181-182.

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Sassens argument, entry into paid work is basically seen as the unqualified

indication of empowerment and improved status for migrant women.

In my brief talk today, I wish to complicate our understanding of womens migration

and provide an alternative framework to this simple argument that migration

liberates women. Before I do so, I wish to just briefly explain why I find the

dominant perspective that womens migration is a process of liberation quite

troubling. First, it reduces our perspective on womens migration to gender without

accounting for other social factors such as race, class, and nationalism. These other

factors are sometimes more salient in determining the quality of life for migrants.

For instance, plenty of educated migrant women from countries such as Peru and

the Philippines experience what I have called conflicting class mobility as they

earn more in the host society than in the sending society but having to do much

lower status jobs than what they had once held in the sending society.3 An

accountant for instance becomes a domestic worker. Second, those familiar with

feminist literature on the family would know that it is problematic to reduce gender

to economics. Still this is what is being done in the literature on gender and

migration. Yet, studies have shown that women who economically contribute to the

household are often burdened by a second shift. Additionally, men who earn less

than their female partners are more likely to do less housework than the men who

actually earn more. This makes sense if we consider Jesse Bernards classic

argument of the male provider being the most salient factor determining

masculinity in our society.4 Third, the perspective that migration liberates women

inadvertently supports modernization views of gender, meaning that women have

more opportunities in modernized societies than in traditional ones. For instance,

the unquestioned supposition in the literature is that women have more access to

public spaces in the host society than in the sending society suggests that women

were locked up inside their houses prior to migration. I should note that despite the

turn towards transnational studies and multi-sited ethnographies in contemporary

migration studies, scholars who argue that migrant women have greater access to

public spaces post-migration never went to the sending society to actually

document and examine the physical mobility of women in those spaces.

The way we currently understand womens migration as a gendered process is just

too simple. I would like to complicate our perspective by drawing from feminist

theorizations of the likes of Inderpal Grewal who tells us that modes of modernity

and traditionalism exist in all countries as well as feminist family scholars who

remind us not to reduce gender to economics.5

3 See Chapter 6 of my book Servants of Globalization (Stanford, CA: Stanford

University Press, 2001). 4 Jessie Bernard, "The Good Provider Role: Its Rise and Fall." American Psychologist

36 (1981): 1-12. 5 Inderpal Grewal, Transnational America: Feminisms, Diasporas, Neoliberalisms,

(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), p. 171.

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Two frameworks guide my analysis for looking at womens migration. The first is

that I see womens migration as a movement from one system of gender inequality

to another. Second I view the process of womens migration as a process in which

gender inequalities are not only challenged and diminished, as purported in the

literature, but a process that also reifies and maintains gender inequalities.

Because I view womens migration as a movement from one system of gender

inequality to another, my analysis usually documents the sets of gender constraints

that women escape in the sending country but face in the host society. In the case of

the sending country of the Philippines, these inequalities would include their labor

market segmentation, the wage gap, and the traditional gender view of the ideology

of womens domesticity. However, these same inequalities do not disappear in the

process of migration as they in fact impact women in most receiving societies.

Let me give a concrete example that documents how womens migration is indeed a

movement from one system of gender inequality to another. I will do this by

revisiting my previous discussion on the international division of reproductive

labor (2000),6 which had been revisited and rephrased by one of my dissertation

readers Arlie Hochschild into the catchier term of the care chain (2000). Without

doubt, the migration of domestic workers results in a direct relationship of

inequality between women. The international division of reproductive labor or the

care chain shows us that women are able to enter the labor market smoothly

because they are purchasing the labor of other women to do their reproductive

labor or care work for them in the family. In other words, men are not increasing

their household work because women are entering the workforce. Instead, a

professional native woman let us say in the United States can conveniently enter

the workforce because she can hire a migrant woman to care for her dependents,

but this migrant woman in turn can only migrate because other women who she

likewise financially compensates are there to take care of her own dependents. This

can be her relatives or her own paid domestic worker.

The international division of labor does not only point to a relationship of inequality

between women. It also speaks of gender inequalities that confront domestic

workers and their employers. It tells us that women confront gender constraints in

both the sending country and receiving country of migration and they pass down

these gender constraints to less-privileged women.

Another framework that I utilize when thinking about processes of womens

migration is to see how gender inequalities are both challenged and reified in

institutions such as the family and labor market. This assertion that gender

inequalities are not only challenged but also reified clearly disagrees with the

dominant perspective in the literature, which I presented earlier. So let me just

describe the reification of gender inequalities in womens migration, because how

6 Rhacel Parreas, Migrant Filipina Domestic Workers and the International

Division of Reproductive Labor, Gender and Society 14(4)(2000): 560-580; Arlie

Hochschild, The Nanny Chain, The American Prospect 11(January 3, 2000): 1-4.

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they are challenged is already very much well-documented in the literature. Let me

make my point using the case of Filipino migrant women.

Filipino women we know migrate to over 160 countries, consistently outnumber

men, and perhaps not surprisingly are constructed in the media as the

breadwinners of the nation.7 Such a construction suggests that womens

emigration from the Philippines engenders significant shifts in gender relations. But

various gender stalls control the outmigration of women and result from the

outmigration of women. First, migrant women are usually demanded and funneled

to do what is considered womens work, meaning jobs that merely extend their

responsibilities to care for the home. As we all know, the majority of migrant women

not just Filipino women are domestic workers. The performance of domestic

work by itself limits the possible reconstitution of gender in migration. It maintains

not only the labor market segmentation that limits the labor market options of

women but sends the message that women are still those most responsible for the

work inside the home. Second, various studies for instance those of Joanna Dreby on

Mexican transnational migrant families and my own on Filipino transnational

migrant families repeatedly find that egalitarian gender relations do not result from

womens migration.8 Womens migration has not led to mens greater contributions

to housework. Instead, in the formation of transnational families in womens

migration, what emerges is a division of household labor among women; migrant

mothers nurture as they provide income to their families from afar as other women

aunts, eldest daughters, grandmothers nurture the family from up close. Fathers

manage to avoid housework not just because other women are there to do the work,

but because society continues to accept the notion that women are the proper

nurturers of the family, and this is despite the increase in womens economic

contributions to the family.

In summary, we need to complicate our understanding of womens migration and

not see it as a teleological path towards liberation but instead see it as a complex

process of gender contestations.

7 See Parreas, Servants of Globalization (2001). 8 Joanna Dreby, Divided by Borders: Mexican Migrants and their Children (Berkeley,

CA: University of California Press, 2010).