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Gender Bias in Skills Definition, Labour Market Dynamics and Skills Recognition

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The Palgrave Handbook of Gender and Migration

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Abstract

The labour market is a key site of gender discrimination. The interaction of immigration and labour regulation amplifies some of the classic forms of employment disadvantage experienced by women, such as horizontal and vertical segregation of the labour market. Policies in these areas can affect women’s access to skilled immigration status or other visas, accreditation issues upon arrival, skills recognition and their overall capacity for human mobility. This chapter will provide an overview of the feminist scholarship on labour immigration and gender, including work on the gendered nature of “skill”, skills recognition and labour market engagement, access to permanent visas for women compared with men and the way in which gendered paradigms can be reflected in the overall direction of immigration regimes towards a marketised model.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Reliable data on the percentage of overall labour flows globally that are skilled is not available as countries differ in their definition of “skill”, meaning that no harmonised estimate can accurately be relied upon.

  2. 2.

    This assumption could itself be changing as more men enter into service-based work where appearance is valued for both genders and as conceptions of gender-norms in the workplace shift (Warhurst & Nickson, 2009: 400).

  3. 3.

    Denmark for child care workers and Australia for child care managers. This states that law in 2011, see Boucher 2016 for further analysis.

  4. 4.

    Fay Faraday (2016) provides an impressive overview of the interacting effects for a bundle of low-skilled visas in Canada.

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Acknowledgements:

Some aspects of this chapter draw upon and extend my previous thinking as articulated in Boucher (2016). I am grateful to Eda Gunaydin for research assistance, funded through the University of Sydney SOAR Fellowship.

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  1. Government and International Relations, University of Sydney, Camperdown, NSW, Australia

    Anna Boucher

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Correspondence to Anna Boucher .

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  1. Center for Technological Society and Human Future, Universidad Mayor, Santiago, Chile

    Claudia Mora

  2. Queen Mary University of London, London, UK

    Nicola Piper

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Boucher, A. (2021). Gender Bias in Skills Definition, Labour Market Dynamics and Skills Recognition. In: Mora, C., Piper, N. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Gender and Migration. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-63347-9_12

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