Women’s Status in the Context of International Migration

Abstract

AbstractInternational migration creates unique gendered work‐family contexts that profoundly affect individual lives in various ways. This paper examines how immigration impacts women’s status in the labor force and in the family. Immigrant women who are laborers, self‐employed entrepreneurs, and professionals experience very different changes in gender relations and work status resulting from immigration. While some become more egalitarian, others remain patriarchal; some enter the paid labor force for the first time, whereas others retreat from prominent careers to become homemakers; some are powerful in certain areas but vulnerable in others. Immigrant women’s gains and losses in their work and family domains are full of variations, contradictions, and constraints. In addition to reviewing the current state of knowledge in this area of study, this paper discusses parallels across scholarly work, inadequacies in the literature, and directions for future research.