Domestic Workers Research Articles

Examining the Domestic Adversities Imposed by Patriarchy on Working Women: A Sociological Perspective

This paper explores the domestic adversities faced by working women as a result of patriarchal structures. Through a sociological lens, it examines how traditional gender roles and societal expectations contribute to the unequal distribution of domestic labor, limited support systems, and the subsequent impact on women's mental and physical health. The study aims to highlight the need for systemic change to promote gender equality in both professional and domestic spheres. This work seeks to inform policy recommendations and interventions aimed at fostering more supportive environments for working women, promoting gender equality, and enhancing overall wellbeing in both professional and domestic spheres. Int. J. Soc. Sc. Manage. Vol. 11, Issue-4: 95-105.

Indonesian domestic workers: Hong Kong migrants’ activism, value creation, and post-migration entrepreneurship

ABSTRACT Hong Kong has become a center of migrant domestic workers’ (MDWs) social activism, but its longer-term effects are still understudied. Therefore, we researched Indonesian MDW return migrants and found that they obtained extensive social capital through their overseas group engagement. Many women started businesses in Indonesia by utilizing the networks and knowledge nurtured during their Hong Kong activism, in a way that is different from typical local businesses. These women’s businesses reveal their unique social awareness and goals of making their home society better. Nonetheless, the women also struggled to balance their entrepreneur identity with that as wives and mothers, and this negotiation has helped transform local village gender norms, which otherwise would limit women’s agency in choosing paid work. By framing this type of enterprise as a form of ‘value creation’ through entrepreneurship, the authors point out the critical importance of developing social capital overseas for return migrants’ successful re-integration into their communities of origin.

A Qualitative Exploration of the Impact of Increasing Criminalization on Domestic Violence Support Workers: Nonfatal Strangulation as a Case Study.

Specialized nongovernmental domestic violence (DV) services provide critical support to victim/survivors. This research draws on 14 semistructured focus groups with 27 DV support workers to examine how expanded criminalization impacts support workers' roles using a case study of a 2016 nonfatal strangulation offense legislated in Queensland, Australia. Our results describe a lack of governmental support intersecting with increased complexity and higher workload burden resulting from expanded criminalization. Expansions to criminal law need to account for and critically assess the full system impact of new DV legislation and the added burdens placed on the pivotal third sector of DV services.

Escrevivência as a Theory of Diasporic Narrative Heritage

Abstract This article studies a theoretical term for diasporic cultural production proposed by the contemporary Black Brazilian writer Conceição Evaristo—escrevivência. Evaristo’s first novel, Becos da Memória ([2006] 2017)—semiautobiographical remembrances of a midcentury favela community during its eviction—exemplifies escrevivência as a theory of the transmission of a culture of resistance to imposed dispossession. The term has been cited in a proliferation of antiracist critiques and studies on marginal subjects in Brazil. My argument is that escrevivência is crucial for Brazilian decolonial thought, given the temporally recursive frame it enunciates, which opens the present and future to prior articulations of Black culture in Brazil. I make three approaches to Becos within escrevivência’s temporal frame, examining literary anteriority (the influence of Carolina Maria de Jesus’s works), narrated marginality (polyphony, embodiment, domestic labor, minor literature), and cultural heritage (the instantiation and circulation of Black language).

The unlimited joy, ‘once you start you can’t stop’: masculinity in domestic technology commercials in Turkey

Recently, studies have begun examining men’s interaction with domestic space to explore changing forms of masculinity and domesticity, arguing that housework has become a leisure activity for men, with domestic technologies serving as tools (toys) for them to engage with. In this article, we explore how men in Turkish television commercials of domestic technologies are portrayed and how these portrayals construct and reconstruct discourses of domesticity and masculinity. We aim to understand men’s relationship with masculinity, home and domestic work in these commercials. Alongside leisure and fun, we explore the construction of discourses of masculinity and domesticity through specific themes such as the naughty scientist, the self-seeking purchaser, and the flirtatious chef. We argue that seeing more men on screen does not democratise domesticity since the equal share of workload at home is still far from being realised even in these portrayals. We also argue that domesticity is aestheticized with the participation of men and technology. Finally, women are used as instruments by men in reconstructing their masculinity through heterosexuality.

Digital Intermediation in Paid Domestic Work in Argentina: An Analysis of Ambivalent Effects on Working Conditions

Recent studies offer ambivalent conclusions on the effect of digital intermediaries in domestic and care work; while some suggest that the digital platforms exacerbate and perpetuate the precariousness of the sector as well as its underlying social inequalities, others contend that the effects of these technologies are not yet clear. Drawing on these perspectives but focusing specifically on the platforms’ organizational structures, this article contributes to a growing body of scholarship on the differential impact of digital intermediaries in this occupation. Based on a study of the digital platform Zolvers in Argentina, the article analyzes the effects on working conditions of three types of working arrangements: regular work managed by the digital intermediary, regular work managed by the employer household, and casual ‘one-time-only’ jobs. This research uses a mixed methods approach, including a survey of 300 domestic workers, 20 semi-directed interviews, and two focus groups with workers using Zolvers.

Do US cross-listings, IFRS adoption and domestic investor protection impact earnings management?

PurposeThis paper investigates the impact of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) adoption and domestic investor protection on the relationship between United States (US) cross-listing and earnings management.Design/methodology/approachThe paper applies ordinary least squares (OLS) regression analyses to a matched sample of cross-listed and non-cross-listed firms from 2000 to 2018, covering 38 countries.FindingsWe find that US cross-listed firms have lower real earnings management. The results also show that real earnings management is lower for US cross-listed firms that adopt IFRS and from high domestic investor protection countries. Our results further show that real earnings management is higher when cross-listed firms use Level 1 American Depository Receipts (ADRs) to cross-list but adopting IFRS and high domestic investor protection help reduce real earnings management. Using the SEC’s Rule 12h-6 as a quasi-natural experiment, we document that post-12h-6 Rule, firms in high domestic investor protection countries experience a reduction in both accruals and real earnings management. However, the result is the opposite in countries with low investor protection.Originality/valueOur findings have implications for regulators and policymakers on the impact of ADR levels and Rule 12h-6 on earnings management.

The role of educational choices in support of gender equality in unpaid domestic work: A case study of psychology and STEM students in Slovakia

The role of educational choices in support of gender equality in unpaid domestic work: A case study of psychology and STEM students in Slovakia

Women's Participation in the Arab Spring Protests and the Prevalence of Domestic Violence: Evidence From Egypt

During the Arab Spring protests, Egyptian women demonstrated in streets in unprecedented numbers, challenging societal norms about women’s roles and rights. Using a triple difference approach and nationally representative DHS data, this study exploits regional variation in protest intensity and women’s participation in the protests from 2011 to 2014 to examine the changes in women’s risk of experiencing domestic violence. Results show that women experienced a significant decline in their probability of experiencing physical, sexual, and psychological violence from their intimate partners in regions more exposed to women’s political participation in Arab Spring protests. Exploring potential channels, the study finds a significant increase in women’s decision-making power in more affected regions, without significant changes in attitudes toward domestic violence or labor market outcomes. These effects underscore the role of increased visibility of women in public spaces in empowering women and reducing their experience of intimate partner violence. HIGHLIGHTS Egyptian women protested in unprecedented numbers during Arab Spring demonstrations. Exposure to these events changed women’s risk of experiencing intimate partner violence. Women experienced a significant decline in intimate partner violence in more affected regions. Women also experienced an increase in decision-making power within the household.

From ‘girlboss’ to #stayathomegirlfriend: The romanticisation of domestic labour on TikTok

Since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, romanticised depictions of domestic work have proliferated on social media sites. In particular, the increasingly popular TikTok platform is replete with images of domestic labour centred on repetitive routines, catharsis and feminine aesthetics. The #stayathomegirlfriend trend exemplifies this phenomenon. Rooted in tradwife ideology, which advocates a ‘return’ to a male breadwinner model of domesticity, the #stayathomegirlfriend aesthetic espouses a romantic ideal of feminine domesticity as an escape from the ‘double shift’ and represents a backlash to popular feminism’s failed injunction to ‘lean in’. Under this trend, domestic labour is romanticised as an aesthetically pleasing self-care practice for a generation who have watched their mothers suffer through the grind of the neoliberal labour market, and who are themselves incited to become a ‘girlboss’ to survive it. Through a thematic analysis of popular videos under this hashtag trend, this article reveals that stay-at-home girlfriends unwittingly mimic the popular feminist doctrine of ‘empowerment’ through their depictions of domestic self-care and channel ‘girlboss’ culture through their work as social media influencers. Thus, despite purporting to reject popular feminism’s celebration of the ‘girlboss’ and repurpose tradwife ideology for Generation Z, stay-at-home girlfriends accomplish neither: subjugating themselves within the ‘double shift’ and denying the value of their own labour on both fronts.

The Lesbian Quilt Manifesto

This practice-based paper presents The Lesbian Quilt Manifesto. This document frames, and states the aims of my practice-led research method. It is a polemical proposal for the Quilt as an effective methodology for re-visioning lesbian archive materials. The manifesto is part of a lineage of queer manifestos that demand and declare, including the Lesbian Avengers, ACT Up, Zoe Leonard and Paul B. Preciado.The Lesbian Quilt Manifesto answers some important questions like: What is a quilt? What is a lesbian? Why would you make a lesbian quilt? The manifesto situates the research method within the histories of women’s marginalized creative production, domestic labor and communication through craft. It unsettles cozy, complacent imaginings of the quilt as a passive historical object, and re-positions the quilt as a dangerous object.

К вопросу о национальном стандарте рабочего времени

This article discusses the issue of the national working time standard and its significance in Russian legal reality. The consolidation of the national working time standard in international, domestic and foreign labor law is shown. Attention is drawn to the need to introduce the category of national working time standard into scientific circulation. It is proposed to consolidate the national measure of working time (normal hours) as a national standard of working time. Inaccuracies have been identified in the rules on the rights and obligations of the employee and employer in the field of working time. In order to eliminate them, it is necessary to modernize certain working time standards.

The fragrance of ghee: food aesthetics, food insecurity and policy dreams

In this short article, we call for policy makers, activists and academics to take account of food aesthetics of economically and racially marginalised people – especially women – when understanding and intervening in food distribution. Although it may seem that aesthetics and poverty are mutually exclusive, and somewhat provocative to suggest that food aesthetics, when understood more expansively, aesthetics is an important aspect of domestic food work, as our findings from our research with British Bangladeshi women from Tower Hamlets on low incomes and responsible for social reproductive labour in their families and communities attest. We draw inspiration from feminist philosophy of food and taste, and everyday domestic aesthetics. Reflecting on our data, we combine these philosophies with Krishnendu Ray’s critique of food sociologists who imagine that people on low incomes lack a sense of beauty because their lives are dominated by their life of suffering. To conclude, we propose that food aesthetics should become part of the politics of food distribution and rights.

“But on Sunday, They Are Free”

This article examines the site of the home in Baby Ruth Villarama's 2016 documentary Sunday Beauty Queen to better understand how tomboy migrant domestic workers in Hong Kong mess up and queer domesticity. By focusing on the appearances in the film of the home of Leo Selomenio, a tomboy Filipino migrant domestic helper and organizer of Sunday beauty pageants, the author explores alternative modes of care performed by tomboys that refuse respectability politics as they operate within transnational migrant labor structures. Despite the regulatory and confining modes of racialized and gendered care that structure global care work, Selomenio reconfigures and reshapes his home to operate as a site of refuge, an archive, a gathering space, and a site of resistance. Engaging in what the author terms “tomboy domesticity,” Selomenio utilizes his control over home space and time as a result of his exemption from the live-in requirement of his work to ensure collective survival in the face of labor precarity. Selomenio's performance of care ethics that refuse the state's neglect of domestic helpers articulates tomboy and diasporic Filipino life as valuable outside of its capacity to labor.

Studying intersectionality using ideological dilemmas: The case of paid domestic labour.

Intersectionality has gained a great deal of academic purchase within the social sciences but there is still a need for further conceptual and methodological innovation and clarity. As such, this study uses paid domestic labour as a case study to apply Billig etal.'s (Ideological dilemmas: A social psychology of everyday thinking, 1988) notion of ideological dilemmas to explore the common sense that paid domestic workers draw on to position themselves as women and workers. The analysis highlights how participants use (often contradictory) themes of common sense when speaking about their place in the household through dilemmas of servitude, belonging, and intimacy. Speakers draw on gendered ideology, not as a fixed set of ideas, but rather as a mobile discursive resource that can be deployed in situ, allowing them to justify, subvert, and evaluate social positions of domestic womanhood. The study provides both a conceptual window and a robust method for studying nonessentialist intersectionality through ideological dilemmas.

Queer Limitrophic Dwelling

Based on twenty-one months of ethnography and interviews with transborder commuters in the San Diego-Tijuana border region, this article develops the notion of “queer limitrophic dwelling.” Building on queer, feminist, and transnational scholarship on home and dwelling, the article demonstrates how transborder commuters negotiate white Euro-American renditions of home and domesticity that emphasize privacy and fixity as the “proper” ideal vis-à-vis the home. It argues that transborder commuters enact several life-making or queer tactics — practices not necessarily enacted by LGBTQ+ subjects — that spatially decentralize their homes in Tijuana by harnessing transborder kinships and by making queer use of spaces and objects at the San Ysidro port of entry and across San Diego. In doing so, transborder commuters’ domestic labor practices produce ephemeral mobile dwellings when needed, allowing them to navigate multiple temporalities and survive normalized conditions of displacement occasioned by US land ports of entry and racial capitalism. Importantly, queer limitrophic dwelling highlights the US-Mexico borderland's capabilities to nourish and maintain life while also being a product of US settler colonialism engendered through historic and ongoing border violence and exclusion.

Prevalence and factors associated with suicidal behaviors among domestic workers

BackgroundDue to urbanization and changes in family structure, the need for domestic workers has surged in many developing countries, including Rwanda. While being employed as a domestic worker presents financial benefits to many of them and their dependents, it also comes with risks and difficulties that might harm the domestic worker's mental health.AimThis study aimed to determine the prevalence and factors associated with suicidal behaviors (i.e., suicidal ideations, plans, and attempt(s)) among domestic workers in Rwanda.MethodIn this cross-sectional study, data was captured from 884 domestic workers in Kigali, Rwanda. Suicidal ideation was measured using questions from the General Health Questionnaire (GHQ-28), while suicide attempts and plans were measured using questions adopted from previous studies in the region. The methods used/plan to attempt suicide were also captured from individuals with a recent history of suicide plan/attempt(s). Three separate regression models were employed to ascertain the factors associated with suicidal behaviors.ResultsThe prevalence of past-year suicidal behaviors was 32.5% for suicidal ideations, 9.5% for suicide plans, and 7.8% for suicidal attempts. Being female and having a chronic medical illness were linked to a higher risk of participating in any form of suicidal behavior. Suicidal ideations were less likely to occur among those who attained secondary education. However, more years of working as a domestic worker were associated with an increased likelihood of suicidal ideations. Having more than five dependents at work increased the likelihood of experiencing suicidal plans or attempts among domestic workers. For those who attempted suicide, overdosing with medications/drugs was the most common method of attempting.ConclusionDomestic workers have prevalent suicide behaviors, especially among females and those with a chronic medical illness, more years of work experience, and those with many household members at work. Based on the present study, for domestic workers at risk, there is a critical need for focused mental health interventions and support networks in various sectors of the domestic labor force.

Women as decision‐makers in the Australian wine industry, 1960s–1990s

AbstractIn the early 2000s international business scholar Ann Matasar declared of the rapidly globalising grape wine sector that no other industry had ‘so resolutely excluded women from positions of influence for so long.’ Following Florine Livat and Clara Jaffré that women on the supply side of wine remain understudied, this article draws upon a large‐scale oral history project (Treading Out the Vintage 2000–2003) to make visible women as industry decision‐makers between the 1960s and 1990s. This qualitative data set nuances Matasar's findings about the relatively limited opportunities for women to exert industry influence in a historically male domain. With family farming as the main entry point to the Australian industry, few women became decision‐makers in this era, compared with women in urban sectors of the economy that benefited from gains in gender equality. Women who attained industry influence demonstrated enthusiasm and resilience while experiencing sexism and, often, balancing reproductive and domestic labour with agricultural business.

The values of children and the use of domestic worker in 5 Southeast Asian countries: A comparison with 3 East Asian countries

The values of children and the use of domestic worker in 5 Southeast Asian countries: A comparison with 3 East Asian countries

Indonesian Migrant Women Workers in Türkiye and Media Representation at Home: Precarity Works and Mediating the State Protection

This qualitative study examines the portrayal of Indonesian migrant women workers in Türkiye by major Indonesian online media outlets from 2019 to 2023. Using content analysis, the research explores dominant media representations surrounding workers in Türkiye's care service and tourism sectors. Findings reveal patterns of precarious work, exploitation, and vulnerability to undocumented employment, particularly involving Syrian employers. The study highlights a significant shift in media coverage from sensationalist reporting to echoing government narratives on combating undocumented migration. This shift aligns with Indonesia's labour-export policy reforms under President Jokowi, which aim to promote labour migration to formal sectors and distance the country's image from domestic worker exports. The research demonstrates how media reflects and reinforces state migrant protection policies through "domesticated protection." However, this approach inadvertently perpetuates victimization and potentially exacerbates vulnerabilities by stigmatizing unofficial migration channels. While intended to safeguard workers, stringent regulations may if not already contribute to increased undocumented migration. By analyzing the nexus between media representation, state policies, and migrant precarities, this study contributes to understanding the complex dynamics of labour migration in an emerging corridor, calling for a more nuanced approach to media coverage, policy-making, and future studies that acknowledges both migrant agency and structural challenges.