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

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

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.

See Parreas, Servants of Globalization (2001).

Joanna Dreby, Divided by Borders: Mexican Migrants and their Children (Berkeley,
CA: University of California Press, 2010).
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