This article shows how skilled immigrant Filipinas resist gender and racial prejudices in Australian workplaces. By activating their rights, they reassert their multiple identities as Filipina immigrants, Australian citizens, and skilled workers, although many agonise for a long time before seeking redress. Experiences of discrimination affect them in various ways, ranging from stalled career progression to negative effects on their self-esteem and psychological well-being. For many, workplace prejudices have made them more aware of their cultural difference from the majority population; but for others, their health and esteem have been so dented that they have resigned from their jobs. Looking through the lenses of gender, race, and class intersectionality, this article also explores the ramifications of the stigmatisation of Filipinas as mail-order brides in the workplace, and, to some extent, in Filipino immigrants' social circles.

Matrix of domination is a theoretical approach that explores the interlocking systems of oppression in terms of race, gender, class, and other social categories faced by marginalized or othered people. It theorizes power in four domains: structural, disciplinary, hegemonic, and interpersonal. Originally used by Patricia Hill Collins in relation to the discrimination and subsequent struggle for equality of black American women, the theory is grounded in black feminist epistemology. It privileges the voices and experiences of those in the margins.

Through the lens of culture intersecting with gender, race and class, this monograph looks at the reconfiguration of skilled worker identity of 20 Philippines-born women who have immigrated to Australia. Through interviews and analyses of their lived experiences, it attempts to comprehend the complexity of their unemployment, from their encounter with the labor market, to their attempts in breaking into the workforce. It contextualizes the institutional disadvantages and discrimination befalling migrant women of non-English speaking background, as well as housework and mothering responsibilities they continue to resist at home. The complex interaction of the women's higher education, English language proficiency, their sense of purpose and other personal resources-all assisted in reframing their subordinated identity, and recapturing their careers. The women risked taking jobs lower than their qualifications, took further studies, went through rigorous accreditation, and acquired local experience, as stepping stones to regain their professions and subsequently their middle-class status. Their journey, however, is not without severe difficulties. By using agency and privilege, this monograph argues that the women epitomized the classical modernist ideology of the self within a capitalist system. They were aware of structural disadvantages and discriminatory practices, but they found ways of working within these limitations, which results to masking the hardships they endured. The study debunks the effectiveness of the notion that individual's capacity over the state "to enterprise themselves" is a success strategy.

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