ABSTRACT
This chapter examines participants' accounts of their experiences of the connection between gender, identity and social mobility within the labour market. It presents how personal narratives can illuminate often hidden complexities which help to avoid generalisations. It considers the different ways participants engage with their stories about negotiating the labour market, which lays bare some of the limits and gaps between policies and practices in post-industrial labour market. Drawing on intersectionality as an analytical framework and based on individual accounts, I examine the multiple and complex interlocking structural inequalities suffered by immigrant women.
Also, unpacking some of the gender-sensitive issues which contribute to restricting women to family rather than market roles, this chapter provides a premise to examine participants' accounts of exclusions and social vulnerabilities. Based on my participants narrative of a link between work and family life, I examine the intersection between family, patriarchy and reproduction, which has received little mention in migration literature.
