Female High-Skill Migration in the 21st Century: The Challenge of the Recession

Abstract

Anna Triandafyllidou 'When I was packing for Greece, I thought that my MBA from Harvard would allow me to easily find a good job in Athens, something like the chief executive officer or, at least, the project manager in a large firm'. Georgia, who is now 47, moved from Boston to Greece in the mid 1990s, following her Greek husband. Since then, she has been helping her father-inlaw with their family poultry business in a small Greek city, switching between the duties of their family-owned shop assistant and the housewife. Her conational Vicky, who had grown up in Washington DC and received the law degree from the UCLA, also moved to Southern Europe as a marriage-migrant to reunite with her Italian husband in Rome in the late 1990s and to discover eventually that she 'has always been no more than a housewife' there. Like Georgia, she admits, 'It was not only the new language that I had to master. It was everything: the children, the in-laws, the local economy and the growing corruption. Many doors were closed for me from the very beginning'. A former business executive from Miami Odette, who arrived in Greece only five years ago and who has been unemployed all this time, concludes, 'It is both very funny and sad to see that our American degrees have not been really demanded here'. The career-failure stories of these women-migrants are not exceptional. According to the Eurostat release from 2011, almost 30 % of all tertiary educated migrants in Europe (which is around 10 million) are over-qualified and de-scaled women of the active working age. How does it happen that highly educated, professional women like Vickie, Georgia and Odette enthusiastically engage in a migration project yet end up under-employed and de-skilled in their destination countries? Feminist scholarship shows that for them, there are indeed many factors that may adversely affect integration and future professional development in the new country. Understanding this, Odette confesses that she sees no future for herself in Greece in the milieu of the global financial crisis and seeks to persuade her Greek husband to relocate back to the United States. Studies conducted by feminist scholars indicate that Odette is far from unique in her pessimism, especially when it comes to the effect of the crisis upon both women and skilled migrants. The impact of the global financial crisis of the new millennium and related economic austerity measures on high-skill migration (HSM) is frequently mentioned in the scholarly literatures and policy texts (

Condiciones sociolaborales e integración social de mujeres y hombres españoles en Alemania e Inglaterra

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“…La cultura y el género como variables contextuales importantes en la adaptación a un nuevo contexto Las particularidades de la sociedad de origen y receptora determinan las características del proceso migratorio y la adaptación, haciendo que sea más o menos complicado en base a su origen cultural (Berry, 1997) y/o también a su género (Isaakyan y Triandafyllidou, 2016). Las personas con una mayor distancia cultural (real y/o percibida) respecto a la sociedad receptora se enfrentan a mayores dificultades socioeconómicas y culturales y a más situaciones de rechazo y discriminación (p.…”

A woman’s place is in the ‘home’? Gender-specific hiring patterns in academia in gender-equal Norway

“…Other expressions that erase the individual worker’s perspective are typically preferred, such as ‘circulation of human capital’, ‘knowledge exchange’ or ‘brain drain’ when the movement of skilled workers systematically impoverishes particular countries to the advantage of others, reflecting and amplifying global inequalities (Altbach, 2013; Blachford and Zhang, 2014; Nerdrum and Sarpebakken, 2006). Women can be doubly disadvantaged by their gender and outsider status when relocating, and highly skilled women are no exception (Isaakyan and Triandafyllidou, 2016). Seeber et al (2016) found that in the Flemish university system, men, native-born and internal candidates have better chances of getting hired than women, foreigner and mobile peers, and the effects are stronger for faculty positions.…”

Highly skilled, yet invisible. The potential of migrant women with a STEMM background in Italy between intersectional barriers and resources

“…On the other hand, the last decade has demonstrated an increasing demand for highly skilled professionals by territorial systems willing to increase their competitive positioning in the global economy, which has been described as a global “race for talent” (e.g., Frank et al., 2004; Shachar, 2006) or “research for the best and brightest” (e.g., Kapur & McHale, 2005; O’Leary et al., 2002). Many European countries have thus deployed skill‐selective labor immigration policies targeting workers in the science, technology, and engineering sectors (European Migration Network, 2007; Isaakyan & Triandafyllidou, 2016; Kofman, 2014).…”