Women in Latin America and the Caribbean - Cepal

87
Box II. 7 (concluded)
To sum up, population ageing is creating new challenges for Ecuadorian society. The current generation of
older women is a particularly vulnerable group and requires attention from the agencies responsible for issues
affecting women and the elderly. In the case of the latter, the challenge is essentially to prevent lifelong
disadvantages from being perpetuated, while in the case of the former it is to expand and intensify efforts on behalf
of women of all ages.
Source: Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC)/Latin American and Caribbean Demographic
Centre (CELADE)-Population Division of ECLAC and Technical Secretariat of the Ministry of Social Development of
Ecuador, Estudio sobre protección social de la tercera edad en Ecuador, April 2007.
H. THE TRANSNATIONALIZATION OF CARE: MIGRANT DOMESTIC WORKERS IN
A GLOBALIZED WORLD
Motivated by the hope of finding better-paid work to provide a higher standard of living for themselves and
their families, millions of women migrate from rural to urban areas within their own countries or across
national borders. In 2005, 191 million people (3% of the world’s population) were living outside their
country of birth (United Nations, 2006). Attracted by the growing demand for unskilled labour in the service
sector of developed countries (Sassen, 2003), women form a major part of these international migratory
flows, accounting for 49% of international migrants in 2000 (ILO, 2004). They thus become independent
economic actors whose remittances help to reduce poverty in many households in their home countries.
A lack of job opportunities and low wages often leave women little choice but to migrate and enter
another country’s labour market, frequently under unsatisfactory conditions with little employment
protection and limited access to social services (González Alvarado and Sánchez, 2003). A study by
Barahona (2002) found that sending women migrants to the United States was a survival strategy for many
families in the Caribbean. This situation has interacted with the sexual division of labour in households,
labour market segmentation and female stereotypes that have resulted in the demand for female migrant
workers being largely confined to domestic service and care for children and the elderly, along with
cleaning and maintenance of buildings and urban infrastructure. Thus, the demand for cheap, flexible
workers in developed-country labour markets is responded to with working identities built up around gender
relations as a way of resolving the problems resulting from increasingly high dependency ratios, which in
turn are attributable to population ageing, changes in family structures and rising workforce participation
rates among women (Ehrenreich and Hochschild, 2003). 44 Many destination countries now have labour
markets that are highly segregated by gender and ethnicity. Gender and racial or ethnic stratification and
segmentation in labour markets reveal the twofold marginalization of migrant women. Not only do they
work in the most insecure and worst-paid sectors, but this very situation further reinforces gender roles,
since they are needed to perform the domestic and care work that women native to the countries concerned
prefer not to do because they have other employment options available (Rico, 2006).
Migrant women are highly vulnerable to violations of their human rights, labour exploitation and
discrimination. In addition, the invisibility of domestic work and the low value placed on it by society
44
Domestic work is the most easily accessible type of employment for female migrant workers in France, Greece,
Italy and Spain (Reyneri, 2001). Over 10% of female migrant workers in the latter three countries are domestic
workers and in 2002 almost a million Italian households were employing foreign nationals to care for children
and the elderly within the home (OECD, 2003).