Balancing personal aspirations, family expectations and job matching:

Exploring Returnee Migrant Women, COVID-19 and Sustainability in Spain

“…Nevertheless, in the COVID-19 period they have encountered difficulties directly linked to heath and care for their children, in life-work balance, forcing women into unemployment, or to flexible, part-time and lower-paid jobs, which do not match their sector/level of education. Finally, a positive fostering element is to be found in their agency, as claimed in previous studies [1,2,4] and their efforts to find reskilling opportunities and rewrite their professional profiles according to the demands of the local labour market; or finding other solutions as international job opportunities to be carried out through teleworking; or to rewrite their profiles through different training opportunities of reskilling and upskilling, while they are waiting for the pandemic to end and opportunities restart and reactivate.…”

“…Thus, understanding the causes and consequences of differing migration and mobility patterns among men and women, and the different impacts on their personal and professional trajectories, requires a delimitation of concepts to be carried out. In this case, I centred attention on women, because they are the more vulnerable group in migration studies, based on the evidence in the existing literature [1,11,[22][23][24].…”

“…In addition to that, the structures of power/oppression have a negative impact on their personal and professional development, and such existing difficult reality has been increased by the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. Therefore, innovative measures and more sustainable policies addressed to an efficient reintegration of returnee women are urgently required, in order to fight against the rise of overqualification and permanent loss of skills in the origin countries [1,41,42]. Such policies are urgent to respond to the negative impact of the COVID-19 and make human mobility more sustainable.…”

“…This paper is based on two previous studies: (a) the first one is focused on the sociooccupational integration of highly educated migrant women from different nationalities in Spain, carried out between 2015 and 2019, during my PhD thesis and published in "Migration at Work: Aspirations, Imaginaries and Structures of Mobility" [1]; (b) the other is focused on the experience of return migration of Spanish Self-Initiated Expatriates (SIE) women, with high levels of education, during and after the COVID-19 pandemic and published in the framework of the Spanish RDI project addressed to Social Challenges: "Instrumentación Normativa de la Política de Retorno de Emigrantes Españoles y la Atracción de Talento Global" (RTI2018-099274-B-I00) which is about the Spanish policies and rules of return of talents, carried out by the University of Granada (Spain) [2]. The findings of both studies show that women respondents' migratory trajectories and professional careers are strongly influenced by the articulation of macro, meso and micro dimensional elements and a structure of opportunities and constrains, which foster or hinder migrant women or SIE women returnee's (re)integration process [1,2]. My hypothesis is that the socio-economic and professional reintegration and readaptation process of Spanish SIE women with a high educational level returned to their home country (Spain), due to COVID-19 complications, is similar to the integration process of highly educated migrant women from different nationalities in Spain as their host country.…”

“…According to Silvia Marcu, "the concept of sustainability gains relevance and contributes to the creation of new models of mobility in the time of pandemic" [11] (p. 1). Understanding what is happening to returnee women, and how they are responding to their needs of inclusion, can help rebuild stronger, more effective public policies and protection systems for a more sustainable reintegration process.…”