The Gender Perspective in Ukrainian Migration
Research on post-independence Ukrainian migration to the EU has seen a proliferation of qualitative works on women in migration. In Ukraine gendered analysis often bears a very narrow interpretation, in which gendered stands for female, while female stand
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The Gender Perspective in Ukrainian Migration Olena Fedyuk
5.1
Introducing Gender
Literature on feminization of migration not only flagged a shift in academic research towards a more gender-sensitive approach to researching migration but also opened a wide array of research agendas rooted in understanding mobility as gendered practice and experience. It also in part marked a response to the changing nature of global labour markets, the rise of the demand for a more flexible and cheaper labour force, growing market segments (such as care and domestic work)1 and the changing patterns and practices of migration. It not only introduced gender-sensitive analysis of male and female migratory trajectories but opened up a number of analytical debates that were mostly ignored in literature prioritizing the “male breadwinner” perspective. These included: gender-differentiated wages and working conditions during migration (see Ehrenreich and Fuentes 1983; Andall 1998; Anderson 2000; Hondagneu-Sotelo 1994; Hondagneu-Sotelo and Avila 1997); transnational motherhood and uneven distribution of care responsibilities between men and women (Gamburd 2000; Andall 1998; Hochschild 2001); and the relation between care work, citizenship and family rights (Lutz and Palenga-Möllenbeck 2012; Anderson and Shutes 2014). The debates on changing gender roles triggered by migration in both sending and receiving countries resulted in a number of analytical concepts, such as care chains (Orozco 2009), care diamonds (Razavi 2007) and transnational welfare (Piperno and Tognetti Bordogna 2012). This growing range of analytical approaches, however, only marginally stirred the analysis of Ukrainian migration to the EU. 1
Categories of care and domestic work often overlap, especially if care is provided within the privacy of the home and the tasks related to providing care for a child or an elderly person overlap with tasks related to cooking and cleaning. However, I keep the two categories separate as care can be provided by migrants in institutionalized spaces such as hospitals or retirement homes. O. Fedyuk (*) Marie Curie Changing Employment ITN, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2016 O. Fedyuk, M. Kindler (eds.), Ukrainian Migration to the European Union, IMISCOE Research Series, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-41776-9_5
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As discussed in detail in other chapters in this volume (in particular see Chaps. 8 and 10), labour migration from Ukraine is strongly determined by the work sector– gender–destination country paradigm. Information on the unbalanced sex ratio of Ukrainian citizens can therefore be found in research literature dealing with migration to particular countries and from particular regions in Ukraine (to name a few Ukrainian sources, Pirozhkov et al. 2003; Boyko 2010; Shybko et al. 2006; Kys 2010; Markov 2005; Parkhomenko and Starodub 2005; Malynovska 2009; Tegeler and Cherkez 2011; Susak 2002; Leontiyeva 2011). Though these few examples do not specifically operationalize
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