Beyond “Women’s Work”: Gender, Ethnicity, and the Management of Paid Care Work in Nonprofit Domiciliary Services in Italy

Abstract

Based on qualitative data, this article focuses on management practices in social cooperatives operating as nonprofit providers of domiciliary care services in Italy. Their livelihood is eroded by the presence of migrant live-in caregivers, who are privately employed, inexpensive, and often irregular. This competition is not only economic but also symbolic, as it jeopardizes the managers’ attempts to define care work as a skilled job and reproduces notions of care as naturally feminine “women’s work.” The article analyses the strategies adopted by the managers to negotiate this competition and shows how these strategies challenge dominant gendered constructions of care work.