Domestic Debates: Constructions of Gendered Migration from the Philippines

Gendered Migration and the Family

The Social Weather Stations (SWS) was perhaps most critical in beginning to engage the broader national public directly around the issue of women’s migration with several sets of surveys after the death of Sioson and leading up to the execution of Contemplacion. While the media certainly played a role in garnering the public’s attention to the issue, the SWS’ survey research, by its very nature, would draw individual Filipinos into the debate in more immediate ways.

While the results of the different surveys conducted by the SWS are important, and I will discuss them in more detail below, more significant perhaps is how the SWS surveys framed the issue of women and migration and its impacts on Filipino families. SWS survey questions about women’s migration are both constitutive and reflective of gendered anxieties about women’s overseas employment. Feminists have long argued that traditional social scientific methods, including survey research, reproduce dominant gender relations through both the processes and outcomes of research.¹ The SWS is no exception, as the very questions it asks of respondents are underlined by patriarchal assumptions of women’s labor and women’s role in the family.

The 1994 “Public Attitudes Towards Female Overseas Workers: Implications for Philippine Migration Policy” survey asked respondents a total of fifteen questions. While the survey attempted to assess how many Filipino families had a member working abroad and how many individuals aspire to work overseas, a majority of the questions centered on the public’s perceptions of Filipina migrants. One of the most notable questions in relation to women migrants and their families was, “When the mother of the household is working abroad, there are many problems and misunderstandings in the family.”² Querying whether women’s employment outside of the home produces familial problems starts from the assumption that family stability depends on women’s presence in the home. While respondents had the opportunity to disagree with the test statement, its very framing relies on gendered understandings of women’s role in the family.

If the SWS produced women’s overseas labor as a problem for the Philippine family, actual survey results affirmed the assumptions made by survey takers. The SWS found that nearly a majority of respondents to the survey believed that, in fact, the absence of Filipina women from their families produces “many more problems and misunderstandings in the family.”³ The author of the survey report points out, “While many of these issues also directly concern male overseas workers, the debate has singled out overseas working women.”⁴ This quote illustrates to what extent women’s migration specifically is seen by the public as especially threatening to family stability. While on the surface it would seem that these “public attitudes” reflect “traditional” notions of men and women’s roles in the family, these “attitudes,” in fact, run counter to the high prevalence of Filipina’s employment outside of the home, whether it is to work abroad, to work in other distant locations in the Philippines, or to simply work in factories or farms.⁵ In the next section, it will become clear how what is really at stake here is less women’s absence from the home per se, but their presence as low-wage and low-status workers in other nations.

Migrant NGOs’ approached their research of migrant women’s migration and its impacts on their families similar to the SWS. In a discussion surrounding their research questions and rationale for doing research, SENTRO asks:

Why do women leave their families? Have the Filipinas, especially the married ones, relegated their moral and family responsibilities of being wives and mothers to the background in exchange for monetary gains?⁶

Like SWS, the very questions that SENTRO pose rely on gendered assumptions that women’s primary responsibility ought to be to their families. By framing its research of women’s migration in this way, SENTRO appears to further assume that women’s employment overseas is both selfish and utilitarian. WID’s research relied on similar logics. WID describes, for instance, how women migrants had left behind children, “half of whom are in vulnerable and formative ages below 10 years old and needing maternal guidance.”⁷ By working overseas, WID appears to suggest, women neglect to provide the “maternal guidance” their young children require.

Though Filipinas’ earnings abroad go towards the material and financial support of their children and, as Parrenas points out, women migrants continue to play an important role in caring for their children transnationally (even if it requires the labor of other women).⁸ Yet, for these specific NGOs, women’s absence both from their homes and the homeland is inevitably problematic for their families. Ultimately, migrant women’s direct care of children (and husbands) in the home(land) is seen as key to familial stability. The nationalist implications of destabilized Filipino families for different civil society actors become clearer in the following section.

1. Sandra Harding, Feminism and Methodology. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1987. [↩]
2. Ma. Alcestis Abrera-Mangahas, “Public Attitudes Towards Female Overseas Workers: Implications for Philippine Migration Policy.” [↩]
3. Ibid.  [↩]
4. Ibid. [↩]
5. Eviota Uy Eviota, The Political Economy of Gender: Women and the Sexual Division of Labor in the Philippines. London, Zed Books, 1992. [↩]
6. Ruby Palma Beltran and Gloria F. Rodriguez, “Filipino Women Migrant Workers: At the Crossroads and Beyond Beijing.” [↩]
7. Ruby Palma Beltran and Aurora Javat De Dios, “Filipino Women Overseas Contract Workers … At What Cost?” [↩]
8. Rhacel S. Parrenas, Servants of Globalization. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001. [↩]