The misrecognition of migrant women’s capacities

Blog post by Anne-Iris Romens, University of Milan-Bicocca, Italy, and Francesca Vianello, University of Padua, Italy

In the context of the hardening of the political discourse, skilled migrations are presented as one of the few remaining acceptable ways of entering European countries. A recent example is the parliamentary debate in France regarding the adoption of the increasingly restrictive law on immigration, which further limits access to residence permits and social rights.
 
Despite this rhetoric, the knowledge and skills of migrants are rarely valued in the job market. Migrants are mainly forced to accept jobs which enjoy little social recognition. Migrant women, in particular, tend to be confined to low-pay jobs in the care sector, including when they hold university degrees.
 
These examples illustrate the ambiguity of the concept of ‘skills’. The notion works as a social marker according to which some bodies are marked as skilled, and others as unskilled, with class, racialization and gender having a significant impact. In this field, recruiters have a key role in defining whose abilities are to be compensated and whose are to be hidden.

In our Identities article, ‘Essentialism and intersectionality in the selection and recruitment of staff: the devaluation of migrant women’s skills in France and Italy’, we analyse the extent to which essentialist representations, influenced by colonial imaginaries and global inequalities, impact the way recruiters assess migrant women’s skills. We argue that labour market intermediaries rely (at least partly) on preconceptions intersecting gender, racialization and class and that associate migrant women with characteristics that are appreciated or disdained. In addition, recruiters might also anticipate employers’ and clients’ stereotypical attitudes, excluding candidates whom they believe will not be accepted.
 
Based on empirical fieldwork that crosses the views between migrant women, recruiters and social workers, our paper stresses that essentialist representations have an impact on the assessment of competencies regarded both as soft and hard skills. For instance, when it comes to language skills, migrant women from countries that were colonized by European empires might be fluent in the language of the former colonial centre. However, although colonization has left them with a common language, it has also led to the construction of racial-social systems that continue to influence social representations and might lead to devaluing their language capacities. As a result, their application for positions that require speaking English or French might be refused, because recruiters assume their knowledge of the language does not correspond to their clients' stereotypical expectations. This refusal can take place exclusively based on the candidates' country of birth, without them having the opportunity to perform and demonstrate their language skills.
 
Similarly, preconceptions also lead to devaluing soft skills, as well as education and experience gained abroad. For example, recruiters’ assessment of foreign tertiary education partly rely on representations influenced by colonialism and global inequalities. As a result, degrees from educational institutions in medium- and low-income countries might be disregarded even though Western international indexes might rate them higher than local European universities.
 
Overall, our analysis puts into light some of the mechanisms that engender discrimination against migrant women and illustrates how they connect to colonial imaginaries and global inequalities. It also highlights the crucial role of employment gatekeepers, as their daily practices can reproduce social inequalities or, on the contrary, contribute to social change when they value the capacities of candidates from minoritized and oppressed groups, such as migrant women. Our contribution further emphasizes the need to decolonize imaginaries, questioning socially constructed categories such as that of ‘migrant’ and detecting the colonial power relations and narratives of ‘doing migration’ in institutional, organizational and everyday settings.

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Image credit: Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

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Read the Identities article: 
Romens, Anne-Iris and Vianello, Francesca. (2023). Essentialism and intersectionality in the selection and recruitment of staff: the devaluation of migrant women’s skills in France and Italy. Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power. DOI: 10.1080/1070289X.2023.2275906

Read further in Identities:

Fragile belonging: professional Polish women’s belonging at work   OPEN ACCESS

Beyond employability: refugees’ working lives   OPEN ACCESS

​Work as real life in the context of organised disintegration – a perspective on the everyday life of refugees