Gender Divisions of Labour in Migrant Labour, Salaried Jobs, and Wealth Elites

Gender permeates all aspects of the work sector and can function as a catalyst or hindrance to progression, as well as a basis for specific working conditions that either benefit a select few or operate non-discriminately. Feminist approaches to labour thus provide invaluable insight into the ways in which gender, race, and class manifest under heteropatriarchal, capitalist systems and the treatment engendered by these variables. Three classifications of work will subsequently be analysed: migrant labour, salaried jobs, and wealth elites, to explore the unique ways in which gender divisions of labour characterise paid and unpaid work. The conclusion will be made that many of the functions of gender are universal, but particular, as discrepancies relating to income are present in most professions, but the extent in which one incurs and mitigates these factors is dependent on one’s own privilege.

In England, the first European country to marketise social care through personalisation policies, infrastructural niches attract high levels of migrant men on account of care recipients seeking out care givers of the same gender and ethnicity. Issues arise not only in the low paid nature of this work, but also in the compromised gender identity felt by male-identifying workers. This comes as a result of the lifelong, non-cumulative assignments of masculinity in which feminine associations with reproductive labour undermine gender-appropriate social norms and perpetuate ‘revolving door’ narratives, whereby the role of men in care work is assumed to be temporary. Workers subsequently utilise negotiation strategies in which they import cultural values into their realm of work, taking pride in their care and thus reclaiming their gender identity. Therefore, whilst masculinity and race can uniquely function to induce more opportunities in care work for migrant men, workers are likely to incur low pay and must institute coping mechanisms to pacify gendered insecurities. However, the delegation of migrant women to nurturant and non-nurturant positions as part of reproductive labour, compared to migrant men who often operate in technological areas and experience greater mobility due to the ‘glass escalator’, renders them victims of racial-ethnic rankings and gender divisions of labour. Reproductive labour, understood as the provision of care necessities that reproduce productive labourers, is essential to understanding the function of gender as hierarchies are implicit in reproductive tasks which often seen migrant women undertake non-relational labour, thus not fitting traditional conceptions of care work. The femininization of care work sustains this institution, as a ‘familial care logic’ is applied which renders care innate to women, who are assumed to exude maternal qualities and domestic familiarity. The care chain therefore neglects the laborious work of migrants, who are devoid of the care privileges and pay of white workers all whilst carrying out more intensive labour. This was demonstrated in early traditions of wet nursing, in which breastfeeding was outsourced to women from a lower socio-economic stratum, demonstrating the correlation between work deemed essential to life and low pay. The social reproduction of labour is thus internationalised through transnational motherhood that engenders the omission of migrant women from global care chains. Gender, race, and class regulate the paid and unpaid work of migrants, functioning to confine men to low paid care work, and women to unpaid social reproduction; both of which are upheld by precarious citizenship deterring protest.

Social orders are similarly reproduced in salaried work, in which women suffer the double burden of carrying out unpaid reproductive labour in the private sphere and paid productive labour publicly. This is sustained by market constraints, particularly in professions where time off for childbirth inhibits salary growth, and notions that a woman taking an hour away from unpaid labour to do paid labour costs more than the net household gain of a man taking an hour away from paid labour to do unpaid labour. Intensive mothering ideologies exacerbate these pressures, as middle class mothers commit to cultivating optimally developed children, undertaking financially and temporally demanding parenting as a symbol of class status and inheritable privilege. The extent in which resolutions to the double burden are accessible is reflected in Catherine Rottenberg’s critique of aspirational texts published by neoliberal feminists. Rottenberg rebukes conceptions of ‘lean(ing) in’ to professional success as she asserts the suggestion that internal barriers, not structures, are the core impediment to professional growth curtails socio-economic justice. Not only are these suggestions highly reliant on a normative bias of ‘market rationality’, which assumes all decisions are made in accordance with cost-benefit calculations, but they also acquit capitalism of playing a role in the subjugation of women. Furthermore, issues are inherent in distinctions between the public and private sphere as politics, particularly for black women, are omnipresent thus making conceptions of private domesticity redundant. Salaried jobs are therefore profoundly divided by gender as women, who are often tasked with balancing unpaid reproductive labour and paid work, fall victim to market and ideological impediments. Divisions of race are equally prominent, with neoliberal feminist discourse emphasising the role of internalised misogyny in one’s inability to negotiate this double burden, thus disregarding the particular setbacks incurred on a racialised and class basis.

Lastly, gender divisions that characterise the provision of paid and unpaid labour proliferate wealth elites, as gender functions not as a foundation on which systemic wage inequality occurs, but as a pretence under which women consent to the appropriation of their surplus value. Inherent in elite work are aesthetic capitals comprised of one’s money and status, which signify relative wealth and reproduce aspirational eliteness; attainable through gendered relational association. Those with lower income distributions must subsequently offer the transferable value of their physical appearance, intended to lure luxury clientele, as a means of converting capital and subsequently accessing closer proximity to cosmopolitan wealth elites. Drawing on ethnographic data collected from interviews with party organisers and guests working in the VIP circuit, Ashley Mears argues women are compliant with the exploitation of their labour as a means of gaining the idiosyncratic incentives and strategic intimacies offered to those willing to forego wages to progress in media industries. Assuming a relational work perspective, she states “exposure, skills investment and symbolic benefits” present in elitist, patriarchal market practices encourage the performance of free labour as women enter economic relationships, framed as friendship, to access the networks of those of higher status. Moreover, gender codes are pervasive within these industries as work is predicated on highly misogynistic stratification systems which, in seeking exclusively white, cis-gendered, heterosexual workers, demand distinct requisites: VIP girls exuding model-like qualities, bottle girls projecting hypersexuality and wife-types possessing a comparable socio-economic capital to that of their future husbands. The division of gender existing in elite industries is therefore double-sided, as disparity occurs in the unpaid labour women passively accept and the intra-gender inequality perpetuated by social stratums.

To conclude, the organisation of paid and unpaid labour is characterised by gender across migrant labour, salaried jobs, and wealth elite industries as gender functions to exploit the labour of women significantly, and exploit the labour of ethnic minority, lower class women cataclysmically. Similarities are present in that they all operate hierarchically, with white, elite, men prevailing and ethnic minority, lower class, women enduring substandard treatment from essentialist practices. This is upheld by institutional norms, whereby the work of migrants is appropriated on account of gender normativity and citizenship status, women in salaried work are burdened with pressure to perform two labour types whilst only being paid for one, and VIP workers sacrifice pay for elite privileges. Gendered practices are thus superabundant at all levels of the income spectrum, suggesting resolutions must be structural, unremitting and, most importantly, intersectional.