Highly Gendered Labor Market

According to the sources, Labor market is very highly gendered. One of the major reasons for the labor market being gendered (more towards female immigrants) has been the contemporary dominant flow of women immigrants from Asian regions towards United States. This dominant flow has caused many female-labor-intensive industries and services to emerge including healthcare, garments, and microelectronics etc.

Foreign females have been playing a significant role in this gendering of labor market because they accept low wages and they are usually being from poor socioeconomic backgrounds. The source explains that Asian women immigrants and other women of color have been a preferred group for recruitment within low wage labor markets because of their perceived vulnerability of class, gender, ethnicity, and immigration status. The statistical analysis shows that Asian women have been dominating the service and administrative industries compared to Asian men. Employers prefer immigrant women because they perceive that immigrant women work for less, longer schedules, they don’t have any problem with dead-end jobs, and are physiologically suited for certain specific industries.

The source also states that Asian women have over representation in traditionally male dominated sectors like Engineering and Computer Sciences fields, hence it cannot be said that its solely the low wage domestic and services sectors where women are selected as unskilled labors but they also occupy good portion of skilled worker positions.

As described by the source, the gendering of labor market has been alarming in the sense, that majority of women immigrants find jobs easily with wages higher than the male counter parts especially in health care industries. This difference in income and work schedules bring about different impacts on the family dynamics. For example, low earning and unemployed husbands often feel frustrated as they feel subjugated to women. Due to tough work schedules within healthcare industry most of the domestic labor is being done by the immigrant husbands. Although among some of the immigrants gender equality is being accepted if they are living within white communities, however, in majority of the cases, it creates problems leading to disturbed marital life. Professional immigrant couples where both husband and wife are professional carry positive family dynamics compared to low wage and own-business couples. In case of entrepreneurs owning a business, women are often subject to do both business as well as domestic labor and have less chances to develop special skills to stand on their own feet.

The source states that despite dominant employment and earning status of women immigrants, they still prefer to follow their traditional patriarchal system. They are happy with their traditions of men dominated household. These immigrant women consider their employment as an opportunity to fulfill their family obligations even better as wife and mother. However, psychologically, men have been challenged for their patriarchal roles in the family due to their low or no income and due to employability and better earning of women.

There is a mixed evidence on whether immigration has proved and conceived as a source of emancipation for immigrant women or not. Some of them feel it as a freedom source to at least be able to communicate their perspective and some of them just keep busy in the domestic labor along with the labor market work, depending on their economic status.