Motherhood and Women’s Migration: Evidence from Foreign Domestic Workers in Hong Kong

Abstract

Female domestic workers often take on multiple roles in different settings, such as that of mothers and migrants. This study focuses on women’s diverse trajectories in timing motherhood and migration from a temporal perspective. Despite the continuities between their paid work for their employers and unpaid care for their own families, both of which are highly feminized, migrant women often face tensions and conflicts between the two; it is difficult to be a good worker and a good mother at the same time. Drawing on the Survey of Foreign Domestic Workers in Hong Kong, this study provides a quantitative picture of how some women decide to move before becoming mothers and some afterward, as well as their different long-term mobility tendencies. The findings lend support to a selectivity process that highly educated women are more likely to be non-mother migrants; they are more likely to move at a younger age and when they are unmarried. However, over time, migrants who were mothers at the time of their first migration are more likely to conduct multiple moves. Such mixed findings suggest that women’s migration is interrelated with motherhood in complex ways, which may reflect the need of repeated migration by mothers on the one hand, and the gender beliefs that continue to regard migrant women as neglecting their families and deviating from feminine domesticity on the other.