Key Terms and Concepts
The kind of labor, including domestic chores, childcare, and maintaining kin networks, aimed at “raising and maintaining people.”
What is Reproductive Labor
This term refers to the increasing interconnectedness of countries through economic exchange, political relations, cultural flows, and the movement of people, goods, and ideas across borders.
What is globalization?
This identity and practice was denied to women of color working domestically for white mistresses
What is Motherhood
This group of Filipina migrant women typically has some education or professional experience but works in domestic labor in industrialized countries
Who are mid-tier migrant Filipina women
The group most disadvantaged by global labor divisions?
Who are female domestic workers in the Philippines who can not afford to migrate?
The three-tiered structural process that describes the transnational distribution of reproductive labor across women based on race and class status
What is the International Transfer of Caretaking or the International Division of Reproductive Labor
The type of countries that primarily receive Filipina domestic workers
In the first half of the century, Black and Chicana women were more likely to be employed in which domestic roles?
What is Laundress, Cook or Servant?
This term describes the increasing movement of women across national borders for work, particularly in care and domestic labor sectors shaped by globalization
What is female migration?
This racial demographic of women did the majority of “dirty work” in the Southwest
Who are Chicana/Latina women
The process by which paid domestic labor replaces unpaid household labor
What is the Commodification of Reproductive Labor
Before this revolution, women were responsible not only for reproduction, but for production (e.g., making soap and clothes)
What is the Industrial Revolution?
The group of women in the International Transfer of Caretaking that benefits from hiring migrant domestic workers
Who are middle- and upper-class women in receiving countries?
What migrant women gain economically from migration
What is higher income relative to the Philippines?
This refers to systems of inequality that cannot be understood separately because race and gender operate together to shape women’s labor, identities, and social positions.
What is Intersectionality/ Interlocking systems of oppression (i.e., race and gender)?
This concept describes how women experience economic mobility and increased social status in sending countries through migration, while simultaneously suffering downward occupational and social status in receiving countries
What is Conflciting Class Mobility
This global economic shift moves manufacturing away from centralized, heavily regulated industries toward flexible production systems, often relocating jobs across national borders.
What is the decentralization and deregulation of manufacturing production?
Why Filipina domestic workers experience a decline in social and class status in industrialized countries
What is the devaluation of domestic labor?
This refers to the formal education or credentialing that migrant Filipina women often possess but are unable to fully utilize after entering domestic work abroad.
What is Professional Training?
Parreñas argues that globalization allows middle-class households to resolve tensions created by women’s paid employment by outsourcing care labor rather than restructuring gender relations at home, resulting in this outcome
What is the lack of negotiation for a fairer division of household work?
This concept describes the global trend in which women increasingly make up the majority of migrant workers because labor demand is concentrated in low-wage, care-oriented service sectors
What is the Feminization of Migrant Labor
Glenn uses this concept to explain how specific racial and ethnic groups become concentrated in particular types of low-wage service and care jobs within the labor market
What is racial specialization?
This concept captures how global labor migration restructures motherhood by displacing the daily, hands-on care of children onto other women, while migrant mothers remain morally and emotionally responsible from a distance
What is Diverted Mothering?
This form of migration is shaped by globalization and involves workers moving across national borders to fill labor shortages in service, care, and low-wage sectors
What is Contemporary Labor Migration?
In Parreñas’ analysis, this form of labor is essential to sustaining households and national economies yet remains systematically undervalued because it is feminized, racialized, and performed by migrant workers
What is Domestic Work?