The re-domestication of high-skilled immigrant women: modifying career ambitions post-migration

• Published in: Journal of ethnic and migration studies Vol. 49; no. 19; pp. 4946 - 4963
• Main Authors: Elitok, Seçil Paçaci, Nawyn, Stephanie J.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Abingdon Routledge 26.11.2023; Carfax Publishing Company, Abingdon Science Park
• Subjects: Aspiration; Career advancement; Career opportunities; Careers; Constraints; Decision making; Disadvantaged; Domestication; family; feminist theory; gender inequality; High-skilled migration; Homemaking; Husbands; Immigrants; Labor market; Labor migration; Migrants; Migration; motherhood; Oppression; Women; United States > US
• ISSN: 1369-183X; 1469-9451
• DOI: 10.1080/1369183X.2023.2189075

Existing research indicates that women's careers are disadvantaged when they migrate for the purposes of a male partner's career opportunities, but the mechanisms behind that pattern are not fully understood. In this paper, we fill that gap using data from interviews with 18 highly educated Turkish women who migrated to the US with their husbands to pursue a job or educational opportunity for their spouse. We examined the women's initial career ambitions, constraints for pursuing those ambitions in the US, and the decisions they made in the face of those constraints to identify the interaction of structure, culture and agency that led to all these women having more modest career trajectories than they had anticipated pre-migration. The constraints on their lives emerged from overlapping systems of oppression that presented barriers to their career advancement and pushed them towards reproductive labour instead. Over time, a process of re-domestication unfolded as the women's priorities and identities as career-focused individuals shifted as a way to adapt to the limitations on their career advancement resulting from structural and cultural barriers to succeeding in the US labour market as dependent migrants.