However, a number of changes that occurred in the decade of 2000 impacted on and reshaped global migration patterns of skilled women. These changes include frequently changing immigration regulatory environments of major host countries of the global North that overtly favour (highly) skilled migrants (Raghuram and Kofman 2004). Skills became the basis for determining immigration quotas (Man 2004). Iredale (2005) identified five types of governmental immigration approaches, with the power to significantly reconfigure
skilled migration patterns. These are liberal (mainly followed by the US), semi-liberal (for instance Canada), managed (a good example is the EU), exclusive-protectionist approaches (such as that of Australia and New Zealand), and the demand-driven/short term model (largely applicable to the East Asian countries of Japan, South Korea, Singapore). The UK also developed a so-called Highly Skilled Migration Programme, implemented in 2002, allowing carefully chosen third-country national skilled migrants, irrespective of gender, to enter the country. Although not on a large scale, such newly introduced immigration selection regulations still opened doors to many skilled women employed in specific
professions or with specific skills wanting to migrate by using the route of labour migration. As per such rules, women became more valuable within migrant households, in particular, in cases where there was room to combine spouses’ skills when applying for a visa (applied for example in Australia), despite migrating as a spouse. Raghuram and Kofman (2004) pointed out another major overall change in immigration rules creating permeability of immigration statuses. For example those who were already residing in host countries but entered through non-labour migration routes, e.g. students, could change their visa status and gain a work permit based on such permeability. The implementation of such flexible regulations aimed at retaining skilled migrants, including women. The constantly changing immigration rules therefore form extremely powerful structures that have a crucial impact on migration decisions, trajectories, and experiences of skilled migrant women.
The described changes and the increase in the number of women entering countries of residence as skilled labour migrants brought about a surge in interest in skilled migrant women. Kofman (2012) identified some streams of research with a focus on skilled women migrants; some highlighted differences between male and female migration (e.g. Shinozaki 2008), many looked at mainly male-dominated sectors such as sciences (Jungwirth 2011), the ITC sector (Iredale 2001; Khadria 2001; Raghuram 2008), or the technology sector in general (Grigoleit 2010). Following the bursting of the IT bubble, there was an increased demand for migrants in certain sectors which were considered feminine, such as teaching, nursing, and medicine. These openings created labour migration possibilities for a high number of skilled women migrants (Raghuram and Kofman 2004). Some pieces of research explored specifically these feminised areas, such as nursing (Kingma 2007; Yeates 2010), medicine (Raghuram and Montiel 2003 cited in Kofman 2012) and, to a certain extent, academia (Cooke 2007; Czarniawska and Sevon 2008); also many researchers studied skilled women migrants who were employed in a range of other occupations. Also, there has been a growing research corpus on highly educated women migrants (although this strand
overlaps with literature on the highly skilled) (e.g. Cretu 2017; Dumitru 2016; Dumitru and Marfouk 2015).
Skill, nonetheless, is a category which cuts through traditional entry routes. As skilled women may enter the host country by way of distinct migration routes apart from labour migration, a high number of such skilled migrant women are invisible due to inadequate statistics on gendered and skilled migration, and also to convertibility of immigration statuses. Some scholars enquired specifically into experiences of skilled women migrants entering through the path of labour migration (Raghuram 2008), while others focused on those who, albeit skilled, entered host countries as family migrants (cf. Kofman and
Raghuram 2006; Liversage 2009; Jungwirth 2011; Raghuram 2004; or Riano and Baghdadi 2007 on educated female migrants).
There is a considerable literature on deskilling and brain waste of skilled migrants. Once in the host country, the validation of skills remains a complex process and is dependent upon certain structural and other factors besides the agency of the migrants. Therefore, it is not unusual for skilled migrant women to experience difficulties in (re)establishing their labour market life in skilled positions. ‘Brain waste’ or ‘brain abuse’ (Bauder 2003) has been a research topic for more than a decade in the migration literature, especially in the literature focusing on the labour market integration of migrants, and still continues to be so. The concept is generally used to describe the phenomenon of underutilisation or ineffective utilisation of migrants’ skills in the destination country (Mahroum 2000; Williams & Balaz 2005). This broad concept covers different types of work-related statuses and attitudes, including unemployment, underemployment, non-adequate employment, and non- satisfactory employment. The term brain waste is often juxtaposed with brain gain, while this latter in its turn tends to be linked to brain drain, at least at a macro level.
The occurrence of brain waste could be attributed to numerous factors. Some obstacles are gender neutral. Challenges can emanate from structural causes such as the construction of national labour markets (e.g. Büchel and Frick 2005; Kogan 2006) and the stringent regulatory framework of professional bodies operating in the labour market, i.e. the
accreditation system for foreign qualifications and the need for host country work experience (Raghuram and Kofman 2002, Man 2004; Reitz et al. 2014). In many instances, lack of host country qualification is a serious obstacle to labour market integration (Bauder 2003; Liversage 2009; Riano and Baghdadi 2007). Prejudice and labour market discrimination against migrants is also not unheard of (Iredale 1987; Hawthorne 1994; Moorhouse &
Cunningham 2010; Shinnaoui & Narchal 2010). In some cases, discrimination was attributed to physical visibility of being a migrant. An example could be Esses et al.’s (2006)
observation that migrants who acquired their academic credentials in India were considered more negatively when applying for jobs due to their visible difference from the mainstream white natives (in Shinnaoui & Narchal, 2010). These barriers often led to earning gaps between natives and migrants and lower occupational status vis-à-vis natives (Zhou 1997). Others explained brain waste by placing the country of origin at the focal point of the investigation. When examining the labour market achievements of highly skilled migrants in the US, Mattoo, Neagu and Ozden (2008) found that it was more likely for migrants from developed countries and also from Asia to enjoy better and secure skilled jobs in the host country labour market, as opposed to those coming from Latin America or Eastern Europe. They attributed this phenomenon to the use of English language as a medium of education in many Asian countries, and to a more significant expenditure on higher education in these states. In positing such arguments, instead of skill underutilisation, they believed that those migrants who were less likely to secure skilled jobs in the labour market had either low skills or were unable to adequately transfer them, thus emphasising that structural, individual and other barriers to successful labour market integration remain tightly entwined.
Certain gender-neutral and personal causes could also form obstacles to labour market integration. The lack of certain soft skills such as good interpersonal or communication skills or the ability to build or maintain networks (Putnam 2000; Collett and Zuleeg 2008) all contribute to potential deskilling. Self-confidence also plays a role in tackling brain waste, as Williams and Balaž (2005) showed when they explored the perceptions of Slovakian return migrants, who emphasised the usefulness of self-confidence even after a relatively short stay of an average of 6-9 months in the UK. They also pointed out an important skill, that of ‘social recognition’ (p. 439), which in their understanding meant the utilisation of skills which stemmed from the recognition by the migrants that these skills existed (as Van der Heijden 2002 posits in Williams and Balaz 2005 it is a meta-knowledge, or being aware that they have knowledge). Moreover, migrants, even if working in jobs that were not
commensurate with their skills, may have acquired certain skills from such work experiences (e.g. language knowledge or ‘language capital’ by Dustmann 1999), which could be
converted or utilised later, especially through return migration, thereby yielding economic advantages.
Some factors leading to deskilling, however, affect migrant women more than men. These are more attributable to structural causes than to the agency of individual migrants, be they at
the macro, meso or micro levels. Kofman (2012) argues that brain waste for women often occurs in cases when the ‘normative gender order’ (as discussed elsewhere in this literature review part) is different in the country of origin and the country of destination. Social expectations around gender, or gender hierarchy within the household, leave their mark especially on domestic responsibilities and childcare, and as such often act as an impediment to women’s careers (Raghuram 2004). These are closely linked to the loss of social networks and the inability to recreate networks (Favell 2008). For instance, mothers with small
children and without institutionalised or private childcare support in the new country often find it hard to leave the house to pursue academic studies to qualify or re-qualify, or enrol on a language course (Salaff and Greve 2004). Certain household decisions favour the male partner’s career, e.g. the man is first to pursue his career to the detriment of the woman’s career (Cooke 2007), or if the man’s job requires geographical flexibility, women’s careers are ‘penalised’ (Clark and Withers 2002), although this latter may not be the case in dual- career families where the partners opt for a sequential approach based on who could fit more easily in the labour market first (Salaff and Greve 2004). Also, Cretu (2017) revealed in a recent work on highly educated migrant women from the post-Soviet area that the idea of deskilling that many of the highly educated migrant women experienced after having moved to the UK was premised on a high level of education, and as such this could lead to the devaluation of a high level of education. Iredale (2005) established a gradual, gendered implication ladder affecting highly skilled female migrants, ranging from home country experiences (such as the equality of gender in the education system, social and family expectations as to the role of women, attitudes towards career building for women) to host country ones (from gendered bias immigration policies, accreditation of skills and conditions to entry into professions). These successive structures, she posits, strongly impact on the ability of a skilled female migrant to reconstruct her professional life in the destination country without becoming overly ‘refeminised’ (Ho 2006). One needs to note that particular occupations such as nursing can also be the target of discrimination or at least prejudice due to their female-dominated nature (Kofman 2012).
Based on empirical evidence, many argue that the causes of deskilling intersect and thus act simultaneously. To elucidate the hardships women faced in the new country, Purkayastha (2005) posited in her research on highly skilled, highly educated Indian migrant women in the US who have arrived via the family migration route, that they faced ‘cumulative disadvantage’. These played out at the intersection of certain barriers such as
‘gendered/racialised’ immigration rules, labour market experiences (public space) and gendered barriers within the household (private space). Similar outcomes were highlighted in
a later study (Riano and Baghdadi 2007) regarding Swiss labour market integration of skilled women, which highlighted the necessity to observe this phenomenon from the composite approach of the interplay of class, ethnicity and gender (Anthias 2001). These markers of difference, however, do not necessarily lead to cumulative disadvantage; some migrants succeed in using gender and non-nativeness as assets on the labour market (see Czarniawska and Sevon’s (2008) paper on women professors in the male-dominated world of academia; this research however is based on an extremely small sample of four women with
exceptional and outstanding qualities, including Marie Curie, therefore may not be a particularly good base for generalising.
Skilled women also appear in the strand of migration literature focusing on care and reproduction. As skills, from an immigration point of view, are largely equated with
academic qualifications, language knowledge and professional practice, the focal point of the literature on skilled female migration has for a long time been on labour market
incorporation. This in turn however resulted in a rather low number of studies focusing on skilled female migrants’ various types of non-labour market participation, including reproductive work, especially within the family or the community (Raghuram and Kofman 2004; Kofman and Raghuram 2015). Skills for instance of mothering and reproduction of cultural and social knowledge from one generation to another, or within the migrant community, are often not valued in economic terms or not as much as the classic
‘productive’ tasks, despite their pivotal role for social reproduction. As a good example for social reproduction of skilled mothers, Nakuga (2013) identified a wide range of
reproductive skills that Japanese mothers felt important to instil in their children who were brought up in the US (Kofman and Raghuram 2015). These included not only teaching Japanese language (home country language) to a high standard but also ensuring that English (destination country language) was thoroughly learnt. It encompassed establishing the ability to overcome identity clashes and becoming sociable, and they also encouraged their children to enrol in art, music or sports activities (Kofman and Raghuram 2015). The non-exhaustive list shows the complex and intensive nature of social reproductive work despite its being taken for granted and to a certain extent underrated within society, and accordingly within the literature on migration.