Women, Gender, Remittances and Development in the Global South

Ton van Naerssen, Lothar Smith, Marianne H. Marchand

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781472446190
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134778072
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Globalisation
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book endeavours to take the conceptualisation of the relationship between transnational remittance exchanges and gender to a new level. Thus, inevitably, it provides a number of case studies of relationships between gender and remittances from around the world, highlighting different processes and practises. Thereby the authors seek to understand the impact of remittances on gender and gender relations, both at the sending as well as at the receiving end. For each case study authors ask how remittances affect gender identities and relationships but also vice versa. By itself this already adds a wealth of insights to a field that is remarkably understudied despite a volume of studies on gender and the feminization of migration in developing contexts. Chapters take an open, explorative approach to the relationship between gender and remittance behaviour with the aid of case studies focusing on transnational flows between migrants and countries of origin. With the wide variety of cases this book is able to provide conceptual insights to better understand how remittances affect gender identity, roles and relations (at both the receiving and sending end) and give specific attention to the roles of various actors directly and indirectly involved in remittance sending in current collectively organized remittance schemes from around the world.

PART I
Setting the Context

Chapter 2
A Gender Perspective on Migration, Remittances and Development: The UN-INSTRAW Experience

Elisabeth Robert

Introduction

In 1976, United Nations International Research and Training Institute for the Advancement of Women (UN-INSTRAW), which as of 2011 forms part of UN Women,¹ was given the mandate within the United Nations to conduct research and training for the advancement of women. The institute’s work departed from an understanding that economic and social development could only be sustainable if including gender equality and therefore, gender cuts across all its subjects of interest related to development such as agricultural (rural) practices, time use, access to new technologies and so on. In 2004, UN-INSTRAW conducted an assessment of cutting-edge topics on the development agenda and selected four which needed to be analysed from a gender perspective; one of these was migration and remittances. Thereby we, at UN-INSTRAW, were especially interested in researching the conditions of women and concomitant gender relations arising out of migration, knowing that in itself the relationship between migration and development is ambivalent when we analyse the phenomenon in origin, destination and transnational aspects, and depending on whether we focus on the perspectives of individual migrants, their families and communities, countries or the entirety of these.

From 2004 to 2011, UN-INSTRAW started research on the topic of migration, beginning with the thematic area of gender, migration, remittances and development. By the end of the programme it had published 10 diverse case studies, covering migration origin countries from around the world, both South–South and South–North migration corridors, and migration from rural and urban communities as well. The programme also developed two conceptual frameworks, a methodological guide, articles, working papers, policy recommendations, documentaries and audiovisual materials.²

This chapter synthesizes key findings from five years’ worth of research (2004–2009), with an aim to highlight the ways in which the gender perspective helps us to a better understanding of the interconnections between migration and development. Examples presented herein are drawn from the research results of 10 different studies coordinated by UN-INSTRAW, in countries as diverse as Albania, Colombia, Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Morocco, the Philippines and Senegal (see IN-INSTRAW and UNDP 2010).

The Conceptual Framework

In 2005, UN-INSTRAW published its first conceptual framework on gender, remittances and development (Ramírez et al. 2005), which served as the guiding framework for all subsequent case studies. Remittances, which are often thought of as the principal and most tangible link between emigrants and the development potential in their countries of origin, are much more than a sum of money sent from one person to another. From a gender perspective, remittances reflect an intricate combination of dynamics that interact at the micro level (individuals, households, entrepreneurial projects), meso-level (labour markets, state services) and macro-structural level (new international, sexual division of international labour). Gender dynamics at work in social, economic and political contexts shape the behavioural patterns behind remittances, affecting both the senders and receivers. In turn, the economic and social roles that women assume as remittance senders or managers can catalyze transformations in gender relations and, in general, bring about social, cultural, economic and political changes. The following graphic illustrates the conceptual framework with which UN-INSTRAW carried out its case studies.

Figure 2.1 UN-INSTRAW analytic framework for gender, remittances and development

Source: Ramírez et al. 2005, 23.

Related to this framework, UN-INSTRAW identified some key elements to guide subsequent research on migration from a gender perspective:

• The household is the preferred unit of analysis when studying the phenomena of migration and remittances. Households are marked by power and gender relations that affect decisions as to which member of the household will migrate, how remittances will be used, and which members will benefit from them.³ Migration does not necessarily bring about a rupture in family and affective ties. Hence, although household members may reside in different geographic areas, the household continues to function, often as a transnational unit.

• The emigration of one or more household members as an economic strategy, and the subsequent sending and spending of remittances, produce changes in terms of intra-household power dynamics, family and social dynamics, hierarchies, expectations and roles assigned to men and women within the household. These changes are not immediate, but have to be seen longitudinally over time.

• The steady increase in the number of women emigrating as primary family earners also leads to changes in their positioning, both within their families and communities at large.

• Beyond the monetary dimension of remittances, studies should also take into account the circulation of social remittances (for instance new values, ideas and attitudes). This concept is crucial to understanding how migration can impact gender relationships within households and communities, potentially transforming traditional conceptions of gender roles and the image of women.

These key elements will be considered in discussing three main questions which we shall consider in the subsequent sections in this chapter. The first question concerns how social factors affect female migration and their remittances. The second question concerns how gender roles influence patterns of remittance sending and usage, and conversely, how the sending and management of remittances influence gender roles. The third question concerns what kind of development we are referring to when considering the ways that remittances can or should contribute to the development of poor countries. Does this so-called development really meet the different needs and strategic interests of men and women?

Factors Affecting Female Migration and Their Remittances

According to UN-INSTRAW, the feminization of migration refers not only to the increase in the number of women emigrating globally, but also to the fact that particularly since the 1990s many more women are emigrating independently or autonomously, distinguishing this phenomenon from previous migrations of women for purposes of family reunification (Pérez Orozco et al. 2008). Although in our studies we are interested in the situation of all women in the migration process, the feminization of migration highlights a new phenomenon, wherein women are migrating to secure work in another country in order to support themselves and/or their relatives in their countries of origin. As we will see later, this is linked to the feminization of the labour market and also to women’s redefining of their role and relationships within the household. The feminization of migration then means that women adopt the role of providers, whether to support themselves or their families, therefore breaking with the perceived idea of male emigrants being the sole breadwinner of their households.

Overall, women represent half of the emigrant population in the world but female emigration flows varies between countries. For example, an estimated 13 per cent of migrants from Albania are women, whereas 56 per cent are women in the case of emigration from the Philippines (see Annex 1). This difference can be explained by different socio-economic conditions in both the origin and destination country that impact respectively on push factors from the countries of origin and pull factors in the destination countries. In both categories, a number of different factors come into play that may help to explain this shift toward gender parity in international migration flows.

UN-INSTRAW case studies show that relevant push factors in countries of origin include a decrease in household purchasing power, exclusion of men from sectors of the labour market, lack of opportunities for social advancement in countries with high inequality, gender inequality (even with degrees, women have more difficulty finding work and often receive lower wages when employed), political and economic instability, violence in general and gender-based violence in particular. This last factor has emerged in interviews we have done in the field (see, for example, García Domínguez 2007), illustrating that not only economic and political difficulties but also human rights violations are an important push factor.

In terms of the pull factors in destination countries, it is important to note that the vast majority of female migrants find work in the caregiving sector (domestic workers, caretakers of senior citizens, nannies). Others find work in services (waitresses, cooks, trade), agriculture and industry, which are traditional sectors of labour market participation for both female and male migrants.⁴ However, the high number of migrant women finding work in the care sector is particularly striking. Demand for female foreign workers in the caregiving industry has risen as native-born women have moved into the labour market en masse in destination countries, while other actors (male partners, the state, and so on) have not assumed responsibility for redistributing the household care workload. Households have been left to devise their own strategies, which may involve hiring outside help, often in the form of migrant domestic workers or nannies. It is interesting to note that while this is a relatively new phenomenon, it coexists with older, internal migration flows wherein rural or urban poor women move internally in search of work in better-off households in mostly urban settings.

The case of Dominican women’s migration to Spain in the early 1980s is a case in point. In their UN-INSTRAW case study, García and Paiewonsky (2006) found that Spanish nuns, who were working in the southern region of the Dominican Republic, which is the country’s poorest area, facilitated contact between Spanish families that needed domestic workers and Dominican women who were willing to emigrate in order to improve their economic conditions. In addition to the Dominican Republic–Spain corridor, several other cases are worth mentioning for their increasing feminization and demand for caregivers. For instance, in Spain, Italy, Greece, South Africa and the United States, caregiving and domestic work are the most accessible jobs for Albanian, Basotho, Dominican, Moroccan, Filipina and Senegalese migrant women. Again, these are not the only groups of women finding work within the care sector, as international migratory processes link up with internal migratory processes, in response to growing demand for relatively cheap, feminized labour.⁵ We will take up this topic again at the end of the chapter since, from a gender perspective, it brings to the fore a more deeper and structural questioning of the division of paid and unpaid work.⁶

Annex 2 shows the sectors and activities in which migrant women are participating in selected case studies, in order to help the reader gain a sense of how these trends play out in different country contexts.

Remittance Behaviour

UN-INSTRAW’s research has shown that the remittance-sending behaviour of female migrants depends in large part on how they emigrated, and on how gender inequality is addressed in destination countries. As stated earlier, women emigrating autonomously are doing this with the goal of improving their own situation and that of their family members remaining in the country of origin. The migration of women from the Philippines to Italy (Ribas 2008), as well as from the Dominican Republic to Spain (García and Paiewonsky 2006), fall into this category of independent migration. Studies show that the average amount of money sent by women is less than the average sent by men given that they generally earn less; however, this lower amount represents a greater percentage of their total earnings compared to men.

Indeed, in many cases migrant women have been found to sacrifice their own well-being in order to send a greater proportion of their income. In addition, sex-disaggregated data show that these women generally are more constant in providing remittances, and that a wider range of family members benefit and sustain themselves with the remittances sent their way. For instance, Natalia Ribas (2008, 19) found that ‘Filipino women in Italy send remittances back home to the Philippines more regularly than their male counterparts. In Rome, 85.36 per cent of women and 64.70 per cent of men interviewed stated that they sent regular remittances to the Philippines each month’.

By contrast, in cases where women migrate to reunite with their husbands, who had preceded them abroad, they may well have limited scope for their own employment in terms of the kind of work sought and also due to the limited amount of time available beyond household commitments. This is the case for most married women who migrate from Albania to Greece, from Senegal to France and from the Dominican Republic to the United States. The opportunity for earning their own income or not strongly influences the degree to which female migrants can support their family through remittances. In these case studies, this is even more true when the man is the primary income provider, and chooses to remit primarily to his own account in the home country, his nuclear family and his own extended family.

We could say then that remittances are closely linked to women’s capacity for generating income, but also that there is a continuum of situations that influence whether or not they can send remittances and these situations depend on factors other than financial autonomy. For example, the type of relationship between spouses affects who benefits from remittances and how they are spent, which relates directly to individual schemes in terms of gender relations.

Lastly, it is important to consider how gender equality is addressed in destination countries in social and economic terms and also regarding leadership. In particular, the existing gender wage gap in destination countries affects both native-born and immigrant women. Thus, migrant women are doubly affected as migrants and as women. In addition, as we have seen, migrant women are channelled into segments of the labour market which are generally not as well paid (for example care work). Thereby, the feminization of migration and the remittances women send would have a greater impact on the origin country if there were more equal opportunities and pay available for women and men in destination countries. The gender–wage gap facing both native-born workers and migrants is a pending issue for destination countries that must be addressed. In addition to earning lower wages, many migrant women – and men, for that matter – are working in sectors where there is little respect for their basic labour rights, which creates greater instability and insecurity which, in turn, affects their ability to support their families.

The Mutuality of Gender Roles and Remittance Patterns of Sending and Spending

Evidence from the selected UN-INSTRAW case studies shows that cultural patterns of family, community, society and in particular gender roles affect remittance flows. Remittances are clearly contextualized and framed by various kinds of institutions. Though individual actors do have the capacity to act autonomously, there are nonetheless patterns that strongly shape remittance circuits: Who is sending? To whom? Who manages the money? Who decides how remittances will be used? And what is the short- and long-term impact of remittances on gender relations?

Cultural Patterns and Decision-Making

Taking a close look at remittance circuits allows us to see the roles and responsibilities of multiple actors within households and communities in terms of sending, receiving, administering and decision-making over remittances, especially where transnational households continue to use informal channels (hand-to-hand, through friends or informal remittance services). Various actors are involved in the circuit who then, based on established cultural patterns, s...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• Preamble
• Preface
• PROLOGUE
• PART I: SETTING THE CONTEXT
• PART II: TRANSNATIONAL MICROCOSMS: ENGENDERING REMITTANCES IN DAILY PRACTICES
• PART III: POLICY SCAPES TO THE GENDER–REMITTANCES NEXUS
• PART IV: REFLECTING ON THE NEXUS AND PERFORMATIVE POWER
• Index