Domestic Service and the Labour Market in Spain: A Gender Perspective on Migration
Domestic Service and the Labour Market in Spain: A Gender Perspective on Migration

Summary/Abstract: Many Spanish women manage to cope with the demands of both job and family by hiring immigrant women to do some housework and look after dependant relatives. In the last few years there has been an important increase in the demand for extra-communitarian workers to carry out this kind of task. These workers have been segregated by sex regarding occupation. In the procedure of regularization of foreign workers that took place in Spain during 2005, 83.4 percent of the applications for jobs in the area of domestic service were submitted by women (around 220,000), with an absolute predominance of immigrants from Latin America. Among the factors that explain this specialization we may find cultural affinity and the flexibility that characterizes this kind of job. This phenomenon reveals an occupational ethno-stratification on the grounds of gender and origin.

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