Highly Educated Women: Exploring Barriers and Strategies for Labour Integration in an Emotional Migratory Process

Concepción Maiztegui Oñate (), Maria Luisa Di Martino and Iratxe Aristegui
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Concepción Maiztegui Oñate: Faculty of Education and Sport, University of Deusto, 48007 Bilbao, Spain
Maria Luisa Di Martino: Department of Linguistics and Comparative Cultural Studies, Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia, Dorsoduro 3199, 30123 Venice, Italy
Iratxe Aristegui: Faculty of Education and Sport, University of Deusto, 48007 Bilbao, Spain

Social Sciences, 2023, vol. 12, issue 12, 1-20

Abstract: This article explores the barriers and the strategies of a group of highly educated foreign women to obtain a job-education matching situation in the Basque Country (Spain) where they all permanently settled following a binational heterosexual marriage. Drawing on 21 biographical interviews with women from Latin America and Europe, we examine new perspectives on the complexity and fluidity between their professional pathways and family projects. For that, we apply an intersectional lens to analyse their life experience. Our results show that respondents involved in a feminised labour market (education and health) have fewer difficulties to find a job-education match. In other cases, becoming self-employed is a way to gain independence and flexibility by running an open market-oriented business. Interviewees identified language, lack of personal networks, family reconciliation, traditional gender roles and the transferring of cultural capital as the main barriers for their incorporation into the labour market. The study finds that marriage support is not enough to overcome the barriers. We argue that for a more comprehensive understanding of labour integration of highly educated migrant women, motivation and agency, linked to family support, should be considered factors to cope with structural inequalities.

Keywords: highly educated migrant women; inequality; gender; binational marriages; job-education match; agency; intersectionality (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A B N P Y80 Z00 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
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