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Skilled Female Migrants: invisible international migrants in European migratory spaces and state policies

Eleonore Kofman

Nottingham Trent University
Department of International Studies

International Studies Association

March 1998

Concern about the nature and consequences of skilled migration goes back to the 1960s when the term 'brain drain' was coined with reference to the migration of professional and technical experts and kindred workers from Britain to North America (Fernandez Lamarra 1992). As developed societies opened up their immigration flows to skilled Third World migrants, attention switched in the 1970s to the potentially nefarious effects of the loss of skilled personnel might have on Third World societies (Oommen 1989). By the 1980s, concern turned to other issues. Firstly, in traditional societies of immigration, the demise of the highly racist criteria of selection, and the development of a points system of entry favouring shortage areas of expertise and skills, led to studies of the level of skills brought in (Kanjanapan 1996) and the transferability of skills and qualifications (Birrell and Hawthorne 1996; Hugo 1994)). Secondly, in response to a new international division of labour, studies of international migration between core countries, increasingly of short duration, were undertaken (Findlay and Gould 1989). The emphasis was on the experts and specialists transferred by transnational corporations, or brain exchange, rather than the scientists and health workers more common in the earlier period. Brain waste too has been a term mentioned in current literature, especially with the increasing movements from Eastern Europe (Morokvasic and Tinguy 1993; Todisco 1993).

It is however virtually impossible to find references in any of these literatures to women or discussion of gender relations, except for the occasional statistics on gender breakdown of employment. Whilst this might not have been surprising in the first period in the 1960s, by the second period, the gender balance would probably have been less unequal. It is likely that in some sectors, such as in nursing, the proportion was high, whilst in others, such as for physicians, it was probably still low, though on the upward curve. Turning to the present period, we might well want to ask why women are still so invisible. Several hypotheses are worth entertaining. These range from the idea that skilled women do not migrate internationally or, that if they do, they give up their careers. The latter explanation might be made to fit married women who follow their partners as "trailing spouses". A third explanation might be that the shortage skills are primarily filled by males and so it is difficult for women professionals and managers to cross borders. Finally, we might want to argue that although women have gained access to professional occupations and managerial positions, they have not risen to the echelons where they might be expected to get overseas assignment. The latter is about the only one with any degree of plausibility.

The role of the state in maintaining the invisibility of skilled female migration is in fact quite complex. States certainly create highly gendered regimes of international migration, especially through policies of admission, settlement and citizenship. Regulation of entry has its most striking gendered outcomes in relation to family reunion, still on the whole a feminised mode of entry, and asylum seeking, where fewer women are thought to be granted refugee status. I have elsewhere analysed the implications of these modes of entry for women (Kofman and Sales 1997, 1998) but will not be able to enter into a detailed discussion of it in this paper. Labour migration for the unskilled is only permitted in specific categories though here the refusal to acknowledge domestic work as a shortage area in Northern European countries has profound implications for the legal status of women's employment and residence. However, in relation to skilled migration. the state allows more scope for the play of market forces. The fact that multinational transfers remain so entrenched amongst men, and at the same time, provide the channel of entry with the least restrictions on residence and employment, is highly significant for women's patterns of international migration. .State policies matter most in the European Union for Third Country nationals i.e. non-European Union citizens. The opportunities that non-EU women will have for entering European Union countries is being sharply curtailed through legislation which favours the employment of those with EU qualifications. This change is beginning to have an effect in the health sector which in a number of occupations is female-dominated .

My aim then in this paper is firstly to outline the evolution of research on skilled migration in Europe and, in doing so, examine the extent to which gender divisions of labour are included. In the second section I shall advance reasons for the general invisibility of female professional migrants and argue that the choice of research agendas have been crucial in rendering women invisible. The almost exclusive focus on a single form of skilled migration, that of the heavily male-dominated inter-company transfers has been one of the main reasons. In studies of European migration, professionals and trainees have all but disappeared. Ignoring the sectors with a more even gender balance has serious consequences for, amongst other things, it reinforces the all too pervasive ideological representation of migrants and refugees, especially if women, as largely unskilled.

This paper should be read as a general critique of the current analysis of skilled migration. It reflects my growing belief in the partiality of the existing analysis. The research itself is still at a preliminary stage. A more comprehensive coverage of European literature remains to be done as does a fuller analysis of existing data. I also intend to conduct research using biographical accounts to explore the aspirations, strategies and experiences of skilled female migrants.

Skilled Migration in Europe

In the early 1980s skilled migration tended to receive only a brief mention in world surveys of migration (Petras 1981). What spurred a more systematic interest in the migration of the skilled in Europe was the expansion of trade, internationalisation of economic processes and the growth of TNCs with internally specialised divisions of labour (Salt 1988). A more transient migration was growing between core states, whilst the movement of skilled personnel to Third World countries was declining (its also possible there was shift of states categorised as the Third World). The first European conference on skilled migration in 1993 reviewed the major issues and suggested topics for further examination (Maffioletti et. al. 1993; Todisco 1993; Salt 1995). The main topics were firstly, socio-economic migration of skilled labour in Western and Mediterranean European countries, and secondly, brain drain and the potential for future emigration from East to West. Lastly, the enormous volume of student migration and its political economy, and the transfer of knowledge and skills it represented formed a third series of papers.

The European agenda is heavily influenced by British research in its typologies of skilled migration (Gould 1988; White 1988; Todisco 1993), and its an emphasis on economic reasons for migration within a general human capital approach (Salt 1995). The social dimension and its interaction with the economic were, on the contrary, weakly developed. British research since the late 1970s has almost exclusively concentrated on transfers within multinational companies and adopted an institutional or organisational approach (Beaverstock 1991, 1994, 1996; Salt 1988, 1992; Salt and Ford 1993; Salt and Singleton 1995). In effect, this means that only one of the categories involved in skilled migration is being studied, that of administrative and managerial staff working in the private sector.

Yet data from various European countries, such as the Netherlands, Finland and the UK itself, reveal quite clearly the significance of professional migration e.g. in the education, health, scientific and artistic sectors (Salt 1992). In France, major programmes for student and research exchanges and training bring large numbers from Eastern Europe, the Mediterranean and West Africa. The distinctiveness of national migration profiles of students, researchers, trainees and professional and managerial experts are thus lost in a generalisation largely on a British perspective

A Limited Life Working Party was formed in the mid-1980s by the Institute of British Geographers to investigate issues of skilled migration in the developed and Third World (Findlay and Gould 1989). A number of interesting questions were raised at that time but never pursued. So for example, they noted the difficulty of knowing about skill transfer within refugee flows, and for which there is usually no breakdown according to skill levels. Secondly, they commented that "for most countries the immigration of skilled workers is normally both a symptom and a cause of economic restructuring and that the study of this phenomenon cannot be separated from the wider ideology of the state" (p.7). Thirdly, they mentioned that individuals and their households merited attention, including the particular problems that occur when SIM affects the two-career households (pp. 7-8). The latter issue suggests a dim awareness of gender relations but, apart from this, such considerations, are totally absent. Similarly, British geographers developed comprehensive typologies of the different channels (recruitment agencies, independent means) through which migration occurs and is facilitated, but continued to conduct studies based on inter-company transfers (Findlay 1990). Although Salt (1988) had previously recommended the use of longitudinal as opposed to cross-sectional studies, there has been no systematic application of biographical approaches, except in relation to the lives and strategic decisions of skilled migrants to and from Hong Kong (Findlay et al. 1996; Li et al. 1995).

Gender Division of Skilled Labour in Europe

What then do we learn about the gender division of labour from existing studies and what interest is there in exploring this aspect? Where the gender division of labour is cited, it is usually limited to the statement that the proportion of women is far lower than men, at least amongst inter-company transfers (Salt 1992, Salt and Ford 1993). Whilst highlighting the importance of gender as a characteristic that affects the chance of being on overseas assignments, a recent study of American personnel in Taiwan (Tzeng 1996) disappointingly concludes with little more than the fact that there are few women (92% are men) and that they occupy lower echelons. There are occasional forays outside the sector of ITCs. Findlay (1988, 407) notes that amongst British emigrants, women were dominant (five times as many as men) in the education, health and welfare category, especially from Scotland, and there were more women in the arts, literature and sport. An interesting comment is made about Spanish immigration where Rodriguez (1995) states that more women are moving independently outside of familial structures and that this has probably contributed to an increase of female skilled migrants. White (1988, 414) recognises the problems that spouses of high-status male migrants, even those with a long experience of skilled employment, may have in pursuing a career as expatriates in Europe. None of these points have subsequently been developed by the various authors.

What reasons might we offer for the neglect of women SIMs, the significance of gender relations in shaping such migration and a consideration of the role of state policies in shaping and regulating these flows? I shall consider in turn the implications of the principal theoretical framework, the nature of feminist studies of labour migration and the empirical focus of research on skilled migration, especially that of British researchers.

Invisibility of Women, Gender Issues and State Policies

1.Skilled Migration and Theoretical Explanations

The increasing integration and interdependence of the world economy has provided the backdrop for a world labour market, initially sending migrants from peripheral to core states. As financial investment between core states increased and transnational corporations expanded their international operations in the 1980s, this resulted in new and diversified forms of migration ((Findlay 1988; Petras 1981; Todisco 1993). European integration in particular has led to the internationalisation of even small and medium enterprises and a growth in the numbers of employees working abroad (Forster and Johnsen 1996). The global cities paradigm, derived from a world systems analysis, has drawn particular attention to the role of migrants. Two disparate analyses have accounted for the presence of different kinds of migrants, neither of which recognises the presence of skilled female migrants. For Sassen (1991, 1994), the populations of global cities reflect increasingly polarised social structures with migrants, including women, supplying much of the casualised labour and workers in the informal sector. At the other end of the social spectrum, global cities, as the sites of financial concentration, attract the new elites staffing the growing financial and producer services. Migrants seem to be absent from this select group, as they are in European studies of global cities (Hamnett 1994; 1996; Musterd 1994). Though disputing the relevance Sassen's model for European cities due to the high levels of immigration it postulates, there is a shared view that migrants are unskilled. Generally there is little reference in European studies to the gender breakdown of immigrant populations (Kofman 1998), although some recent work is showing an awareness of the greater intricacies of patterns of ethnic and gendered employment (Kloosterman 1996). It has, however, still to embrace the idea that women may be entrepreneurs and skilled migrants.

Furthermore, and crucially for a deeper understanding of the employment of migrants in major cities, is the key nexus between domestic and global restructuring which disappears with the above analysis. One of the main areas of restructuring in European states has been welfare, which employs large numbers of skilled and unskilled labour in European states. Large sections of the health service would collapse without non-British trained doctors and nurses. According to the Labour Force Survey, only 72% of doctors currently practsiign in the UK were born in the UK. Of those born abroad 47% were from the Indian sub-continent. The shortage of doctors has continued in the past decade with the number of registered doctors who have qualified in the UK falling from 61% in 1986 to 42% in 1995 (Hardill and Raghuram 1998). Clearly UK medical schools are not producing enough doctors. With the increasing harmonisation of European qualifications, these shortages are increasingly being met by EU doctors who have the right of residence and employment within the EU. The changes in legislation are bringing about a shift in the foreign-origin of UK doctors. In nursing too, there has been a long history of foreign-born and foreign-trained personnel. Unlike the United States (Rockett and Putnam 1989), we know relatively little about the immigration of health professionals (Anwar and Ali 1987; Secombe et al. 1993), let alone the impact of recent changes in national and European legislation.

Another approach to the analysis of immigration in global cities has, on the contrary, focused on their attractiveness for skilled migrants from other core states (Beaverstock 1991, 1994, 1996). In such a male- dominated world of financial and producer services (accountants, bankers), it is unsurprising that women are hard to find. Recent feminist research on the financial world in the City of London has confirmed that despite the increasing numbers of women in professional occupations, there are still few who have reached senior management positions (McDowell 1997, 18-19). In merchant banking, for example, women are more likely to be found in support services than in the most prestigious income-generating services. The lack of discussion of gender issues may well be due to the methodological approach adopted which pursues a cross-sectional approach and institutional approach, privileging the views and needs of employers and personnel managers (see section below).

2.Methodological Individualism

The international migrant remains the single person, usually assumed to be male, who is disembodied and disembedded from any context such as familial or household relationships or local society. The study of international migration is largely shaped by a traditional behaviourist analysis which situates the decision to migrate either within a career trajectory (Salt 1988) or the needs of the transnational corporation seeking to maximise its use of expertise (Beaverstock 1994, 1996). Even within a behaviourist perspective, it should be possible to investigate the world beyond the workplace. Companies may find it difficult to persuade older staff to transfer in an era when the "trailing wife" (Breugel 1996) can no longer be taken for granted. Similarly, there is some evidence that it is easier to get couples to move whilst they have young children given that child care in the UK is expensive, still strong pressure for women not to work whilst children are young. Conversely, it may be easier to get child care and other domestic labour in the foreign country. These issues are only beginning to be explored in studies of expatriate women (Hardill and MacDonald 1998) and human resource approaches to the relocation of dual career couples.

3.Feminist Analyses of International Migration

Feminist studies on international migration in Europe have oddly enough played their part in creating the invisibility of skilled female migrants. The European research which put female migration on the agenda in the 1980s (Morokvasic 1984 ; Phizacklea 1983) wanted to demonstrate above all that women worked and were not. confined to the home or domestic responsibilities. Mainstream research has tended to assume that family reunion migrants did not work or, if they did, it was for pin money and in unskilled jobs.. Even today we know very little about the employment patterns of women who are admitted as family migrants. I have argued elsewhere (Kofman 1997; 1998) for the need to challenge the assumptions attached to this kind of migration which remains the single largest form of legal immigration into European Union states. There is evidence from one of the few large-scale studies of groups with high rates of family migration (Tribalat 1995) that the educational qualification of female migrants has been rising. In certain instances, as with Algerian women, the female migrant may be more highly educated than her male partner.

As we have seen, Sassen (1984, 1988, 1991), has unfortunately reinforced the idea of women as unskilled migrants working in sweatshops, in the home and in the informal service sector. Certainly there are a few exceptions to the representation of women migrants as unskilled workers, for example, Morokvasic's study of migrant women entrepreneurs (1991), Bhachu's (1993) critique of a unidimensional view of Asian women and Lutz's study (1993) of migrant women as community mediators in the welfare sector. Yet in the earlier migration flows in the 1960s to European states, especially the UK and France with their colonial links, many women worked in the intermediate professions of nursing, social work and teaching. Furthermore, amongst certain groups in the UK, such as East African Asians, West Africans, South-East Asians, there is a higher proportion of women in professional and managerial categories than amongst non-migrant women.

Whilst women are now seen as "social actors" in the process of international migration in Europe (Campani 1996), it may not be any easier to get away from the notion that female migrants are overwhelmingly unskilled. This is because the greatest demand for female labour is domestic work, which is classified as unskilled. It was only in Southern European countries, with obviously deficient provision in child and elderly care and high proportions of female immigrants amongst groups, such as the Filipinas, Cap Verdians and Peruvians in Italy, that the presence of female domestic labour has been visible. In Northern European countries, there has been a policy blindness to the existence of migrant domestic labour, and only recently has the EU funded a major study on this subject (Anderson 1997; Anderson and Phizacklea 1997). The problem arising from a general lack of interest from politicians and academics (Friese 1995) is compounded by the fact that, whilst domestic labour is classified as unskilled, many of those who do it are not (Andall 1995; Escriva 1997) As Marianne Friese points out the market is producing a new international division of labour between women. In Germany this takes the form of two symbiotic processes, that of the devaluation of female education supplying well qualified women from Eastern Europe, on the one hand, and a limited career achievement by West European middle class women, on the other.

Friese's descriptions of migrant women's qualifications and experiences highlight the increasing web of dependency between those able to capitalise on their education and those whose qualifications have been devalued by economic restructuring:

" German, French, Russian, Polish speaking woman 40, qualified teacher, seeks work as childminder and home help, with lodgings, if possible" (An advertisement in a West German newspaper).

"A Polish woman with a degree in agricultural engineering, 32 years, finds work with women (9 in all) who are setting themselves up in careers (psychologist, therapist, architect, teacher) but have to deal with childcare."

4.Narrow Focus of Research Agendas

Research on skilled international migration has been data-led (Findlay and Gould 1989). In the UK, only migrants (EU migrant do not) who require work permits i.e. those who apply to the Overseas Labour Section of the Department of Employment generate data which can be individually analysed. Most primary research in Britain has focused on inter-company transfers (ITC), which in the early 1990s comprised just under a half of long-term permits issued. The ITC group includes a disproportionate percentage of migrants from the US and Japan and and is heavily male, especially from the latter country. Only 30% of women are corporate transferees compared to 77% of men (Salt and Singleton 1995).

Women still face difficulties in being sent on overseas assignments (Adler 1994). There are even fewer British than American women in multinationals; it would seem that women are not given the chance to opt for overseas relocations and that these decisions are made within male networks (Forster and Johnsen 1996), When they are sent abroad, they are generally unaccompanied by their families (only 25% of American female expatriates were), unlike 80% of American men who are accompanied (Reynolds and Bennett 1991). It is not clear whether these women were single.

The significant point is that the other major categories in the Overseas Labour data are dealt with summarily. The two principal ones are firstly educational, health and welfare professionals (EHW) and managers and, secondly, scientific and technical professionals and managers (the old brain drain category). The first group rose sharply as a proportion of long-term work permits from the mid 1980s to the 1990 , yet no detailed analysis was thought necessary (Salt and Singleton 1995). In terms of country of origin, the US and Japan have the lowest proportion in the educational, health and welfare group (both well under a fifth) compared to Australia with 30% and Nigera with 57% of its permits in this group (Salt and Ford 1993, 305). Just as there are major differences in the distribution of countries of origin between categories, so there are major differences in gender. Forty per cent of women but only 7% of men were classified as EHW professionals and managers. It is likely that these differences explain the enormous inequalities of income. A number of listed shortages are in specialist nursing fields which are not as well remunerated as corporate managers and producer services. Women were far less well rewarded. In 1992 nearly half the women earned less than [sterling]15,000 compared with only 4.5% of men. At the other end of the income band, almost a half of men earned over [sterling]40,000 in contrast to 12.5% of women.

The International Passenger Survey (an annual survey based on a small sample of those entering the UK) does not split up the professional, managerial and scientific groups, but it does indicate a high proportion of skilled female migrants. As with men, ahigh proportion of this group head for London as a global city with its many opportunities in the cultural industries, education, health, computing and administration. Studies from sending countries, such as Australia (Hugo 1994) confirm a trend of increasing female professional emigration. Indeed, two-thirds of Australian migrants in the 1990s have been female while the Old Commonwealth overall has a female majority. It should be noted that many of this group, either because of their patrial status or if they are on working holidays, do not require work permits.

I would suggest that this narrow focus on the highest echelons of inter-company transfers partly reflects a kind of 'neo-liberal" agenda to the extent that researchers have opted to study what they see as the wealth generators who were at the centre of government preoccupations in the 1980s. As some of my male colleagues would say, it is a sexy topic. ITC migrants are seen as the jet setters, they demonstrate the reality of globalisation and a borderless world. Welfare, on the other hand, represents a past world (as if it were all publicly funded) and is definitely not a sexy topic. Researchers have lost, or may never have had any interest, in flows from the Third World to the core economies where, often under the guise of "training", Western states have staffed their health services and benefited from labour that does not threaten their own promotion prospects. Today in Europe the harmonisation of qualifications and the creation of demarcated professional frontiers is leading to a clearer segregation of EU and non-EU medical personnel (Fekete 1997).

Conclusion

In this paper I have traced the development of research agendas on skilled international migration in Europe and shown how the emphasis on inter-company transfers by British geographers and the concerns of earlier feminist research have both conspired to occlude the presence of skilled female migrants. In the 1980s the emergence of a new international division of labour gave rise to an interest in more transient forms of migration as companies expanded their overseas operations. Unfortunately, this became the sole focus for researchers, leading them to ignore and exclude other categories of skilled international migration. Specific occupations in producer services and high technology were singled out for further study so as to acquire a deeper understanding of corporate cultures and the employment of expatriates. In effect, skilled migration was and is being studied extremely partially. The other categories of professional and scientific employment with their different gender balances, conditions of work and remuneration have been sidelined. Eastern European migration which occupies a far more important role in other Western European countries (Ardittis 1994), especially Germany and France, is also marginalised. These flows also raise issues about the relationship between student migration and subsequent permanent migration as well as the deskilling of migrants.

Of course, even if the other sectors I have mentioned were taken into account it would not guarantee that the analysis included more than a gender breakdown of employment, as we have seen in some of the recent publications on labour migration and multinationals. Few studies have moved beyond an employer-oriented and cross-sectional approach, despite the earlier suggestions for longitudinal and biographical analyses, except for the highly innovative methods deployed in the study of skilled migration to and from Hong Kong (Findlay et al. 1996, Li et al. 1995). The wider application of such qualitative approaches would enable a more detailed exploration of a wider influences on career development and the aspirations of expatriates themselves. Many directions of enquiry, outlined in the research agendas of the 1980s, have been left untouched. The relatively newer field of human resource management has added the issue of the dual career couple, as an increasingly common form of household, to its future research agenda on expatriates (Brewster and Scullion 1997). It also recognises that work considerations are not the only relevant ones in decisions made about relocation.

Making women visible in European migratory spaces is not simply a matter of enumerating them. By drawing attention to their presence we shall also contribute to a fuller understanding of a number of key aspects of contemporary processes of international migration, such as the gendered nature of international division of labour and migrants in major European cities. It would also broaden out the considerations we bring to bear on international migration and locate it more firmly within social theory (Portes 1997; Kofman forthcoming a) and changes in social structure. Finally, with the current state of our knowledge it is difficult to come to any conclusions on the impact of state policies for the international movement of female skilled migrants in a period of increasing European integration. As we have seen, the category of skilled migrant is heterogeneous, with each group confronting different conditions of entry and employment. The means of negotiating and manipulating existing immigration legislation and employment practices also depend on the status of the female migrant e.g. independent, accompanying spouse or the less common situation of being accompanied. These are questions to which unfortunately I cannot yet give an answer.

References