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‘Race’ and ‘culture’ in the gendering of labourmarkets: South Asian young Muslim women and thelabour marketAvtar Brah a ba Senior Lecturer in the Centre for Extra‐Mural Studies, Birkbeck College, University ofLondonb Visiting Rockefeller Fellow at the Center for Cultural Studies, University of California,Santa CruzVersion of record first published: 30 Jun 2010.

To cite this article: Avtar Brah (1993): ‘Race’ and ‘culture’ in the gendering of labour markets: South Asian young Muslimwomen and the labour market, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 19:3, 441-458

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.1993.9976376

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TOIT community 19(3): 441-458 April 1993

'Race' and 'culture' in the gendering of labourmarkets: South Asian young Muslim womenand the labour market

Avtar Brah

Abstract This article attempts to develop an analyticalframework for understanding the racialised gendering oflabour markets. It is offered as part of an effort to theorisemore adequately the place of paid work in the lives of Asianyoung Muslim women in Britain. Based upon in-depth inter-views with individual young Muslim women of Pakistaniorigin as well as group interviews it addresses theirnarratives as social biographies embedded within changingeconomic poitical and cultural conditions of present-dayBritain. Arguing against a general theory of gender thatcould then be applied to analysing specific instances of paidwork the framework proposed highlights the importance ofstudying the intersections between gender, class, ethnicity,racism, religion and other axes of differentiationsempiricallly and historically as contingent relationships. Theyoung Muslim's women's narratives demonstrate thecontradictory interplay of these articulations in their lives.Whilst the majority of women favour women' rights to paidemployment there is no simple one-to-one correspondencebetween this and how they perceive their own situation, ornegotiate the outcomes they desire. Overall the researchshows women's position in the labour market to be inscribedby a multiplicity of factors including the impact of globaland the national economy on the local labour markets,cultural ideologies about women and paid work, role ofeducation in mediating job aspirations, and racism.

Feminist critiques of gender-blind approaches to the study of labour markets havedemonstrated that gender relations do not simply articulate with, but rather, arepart of the very fabric of labour markets as they have developed. That is, genderis a constitutive element in the formation of labour markets. Studies show thatgender underpins such aspects as the definition of skill, the construction of thedivision between full-time and part-time work, the differential between men'sand women's wages, segregation of the labour market into 'men's jobs' and'women's jobs', the nature and type of hierarchies sustained by cultures of theworkplace, and the experience of paid work in the formation of identities (ci.Beechey 1988 for an overview). Much less attention has been paid to issuesassociated with 'race', culture and ethnicity in the gendering of labour markets(but see, for instance, Westwood 1984; Brah 1986; Westwood and Bachu 1989;

Avtar Brah is a Senior Lecturer in the Centre for Extra-Mural Studies, Birkbeck College,University of London. She is a Visiting Rockefeller Fellow at the Center for Cultural Studies,University of California at Santa Cruz during the academic year 1992/3.

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Phizacklea 1990; Walby 1990; Bhavnani 1991). It is crucial, in my view, toconceptualise the labour market as mediated by 'race', class, gender, ethnicity,age, disability and sexuality.

But how are such links to be theorised? The task is made even more complexwhen we note a general tendency in the literature to theorise the macro and microlevels of analysis as separate, almost 'independent levels'. My own interest residesin trying to understand how the macro and micro inhere. My aim in this articleis to outline a framework which highlights the interconnectedness of the macroand the micro in explicating racialised gendering of labour markets. I offer thisframework as part of an attempt to theorise more adequately young Muslimwomen's relationship to the labour market in Britain, but the framework will havea wider applicability. In seeking to understand how the issue of paid work featuresin women's lives it is important to address what the women themselves say aboutsuch matters. But, my argument is that analysis of women's narratives must beframed against wider economic, political and cultural processes in non-reductiveways. In the framework that I propose, structure, culture and agency areconceptualised as inextricably linked, mutually inscribing formations.

Discussions on the subject of South Asian young Muslim women's employmenttend to be dominated by a concern with statistics which point to lower economicactivity rates for this category of women compared with other groups of Asianand non-Asian women in Britain. Much less attention has been paid to the realitiesbehind the statistics. Why are young Muslim women under-represented in thelabour market? What is the nature and range of factors that limit young Muslimwomen's fuller participation in the labour market? What are the continuities anddiscontinuities in the Ufe histories of those young women not engaged in paid workas compared with those who are in employment? What are the similarities anddifferences in the labour market experiences of different categories of Muslimwomen, as, for example, married women compared with unmarried women, orwomen recently arrived from Pakistan as compared with those who have beenbrought up in Britain? How are educational institutions and Government TrainingSchemes perceived and experienced by Muslim women? Such questions have rarelybeen addressed by previous research but form the core of a recently completedstudy (Brah and Shaw 1992). ' Here I analyse how questions of paid employmentare featured in the narratives of the women we interviewed; how these narrativesprovide instances of the ways in which women's individual biographies intersectwith changing socio-economic and political conditions of present-day Britain. Thatis, how the 'discursive' and the 'material' are encountered in the everyday of livedexperience.

A framework for analysis

Discussions of Muslim women's participation in the labour market are suffusedwith 'culturalist' explanations. It is argued that Muslim women are prevented fromtaking up paid employment by Muslim men. The racialised themes in suchdiscourses are now well documented (cf. Parmar 1982; Brah and Minhas 1985;Brah 1987,1992; Lutz 1992). Such explanations fail to take into account a varietyof factors that are central to an understanding of the racialised gendering of labour

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markets in contemporary Europe. I do not believe that analyses of women'semployment necessarily demand a general theory of gender that can subsequentlybe deployed in analysing the specific instance of paid work. Rather, I favour analysisof historically specific gendered processes that avoid demarcating 'public' and'private' as analytically separate domains, but which are able to interrogate thesocial construction of these spheres as distinct social spaces. Social labour is thusunderstood as gendered in historically variable forms. Such variation is embeddedwithin histories of slavery, colonialism, imperialism, and the currently evolvingglobal order that is underpinned by 'G Sevenism'.

I would emphasise the importance of studying the articulation between differentforms of social differentiation empirically and historically, as contingentrelationships with multiple determinations. Within such a framework a study ofyoung Muslim women and the labour market would need to address how the labourof this category of women is:

(a) socially constructed;(b) represented in discourse;(c) is constituted by and is constitutive of labour markets; and,(d) is framed within personal narratives and collective histories.

It will be evident from the above that there is no suggestion of a binary dividewithin this formulation between culture and structure. A concept of culture thatis evoked here does not reference a fixed array of customs, values, and traditions.But rather, culture is conceptualised as a process; a nexus of intersecting signifi-cations; a terrain on which social meanings are produced, appropriated, disruptedand contested. Cultural specifities remain important but they are construed as fluidmodalities, as shifting boundaries that mediate stuctures and relations of power.Hence, structure and culture are enmeshing formations. The one is not privilegedover the other. What is of greater significance is how structures — economic,political, ideological — emerge and change over time in and through systems ofsignification, and how they in turn shape cultural meanings.

In using such a framework in order to understand the relationship of youngMuslim women to the labour market it would be necessary to de-construct theconcept of 'Muslim woman' as it has been constituted in British discourse. Wewould need to consider to what extent and in what ways these social representationsconstruct 'Muslim woman' as a racialised category, and how these stereotypes mightserve to structure their position in the labour market. In so doing we would behighlighting processes whereby labour markets become racially gendered. Simul-taneously, we would need to examine how women position themselves with respectto such discourses. In other words, what light do women's personal narrativesthrow on the way in which such discursive significations are implicated in theirpersonal and social identities. Do women occupy oppositional or non-oppositionalsubject positions within such discourses? Do their own perceptions of themselvesreinforce or contest social meaning embodied in such discourses?

The point I wish to stress is that it is crucial to make a distinction between'Muslim woman' as a category of discourse and Muslim women as concretehistorical subjects with varying and diverse social and personal biographies andsocial orientations.

There are at least seven other dimensions that are central to the framework

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I am proposing. These are equally critical in explaining the nature, extent andpatterns of Muslim women's participation in the labour market. These are:

(i) The history of colonialism and imperialism that framed the patterns of post-1 World War II migrations into Western Europe,

(ii) The timing of migration.(iii) The restructuring of the national and global economies,(iv) The changing structure of the regional and local labour markets,(v) State policies, especially on immigration control.

(vi) Racial discrimination in the labour market.(vii) Segmentation of the labour market by gender, class, age and ethnic

background.

I now elaborate this framework by drawing out its implications for understandingissues of 'race' and ethnicity with respect to gendered labour markets. In the firstsection I consider how the seven dimensions listed above inscribe the terrain onwhich young Muslim women's relationship to the labour market is negotiated.I then go on to outline the nature of social imagery through which Muslim womenare socially constructed in Britain and the impact of these on how Muslim youngwomen are positioned in relation to the labour market. This is followed by anexamination of the narratives of women we interviewed with the aim of under-standing how women themselves view issues concerning paid work and how theyexperience the labour market.

The historical perspective

How would the proposed framework inform a study of young Muslim women andthe labour market, such as the one we made?

Firstly, its emphasis on a historical perspective draws attention to the colonialbackground that frames the formation of South Asian communities in Britain. Thecolonial relationship, as is now well known, was a complex and contested relation-ship of not only economic and political domination but one that was underpinnedby gendered forms of racism. For instance, as Mies (1986) points out, colonialregimes of accumulation were centrally implicated in class-mediated changes inthe organisation and structure of families and households in metropolitan societiesas much as they were in the colonies. The emergence of the notion of a 'familywage' in Western societies, she argues, owes not a little to the extraction of surplusfrom the colonies. Certain weaknesses in parts of her argument notwithstanding(cf. Walby 1990), Mies demonstrates the centrality of gender and racialisationprocesses as constitutive elements in the development of a global economy.Patriarchal systems of the colonisers and the colonised have been interconnectedsince long before the post World War II migrations from the subcontinent.

A historical perspective also focuses attention on the conditions under whichimmigrant labour was deployed in post war Britain. The economic boom from1945 until the late 1960s that helped to draw a growing number of white Britishwomen into the labour force also led to the recruitment of workers from Britain'sformer colonies. Both sets of workers were employed predominantly in low wagesectors of the economy. Segregation of the labour market by gender meant,

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however, that male and female workers were concentrated in different sectors ofthe economy.

Asian women experienced the labour market not simply through their genderbut also as racialised subjects. Even within a gender-segregated labour market theyoccupy a distinctive position compared with white women. Overall, a higherproportion of women than men in Britain are engaged in part-time work. Thispattern of employment is often taken as a major contributory factor towardswomen's low pay. However, a higher proportion of Asian women than whitewomen are in full-time employment. Yet their earnings are lower compared withwhite women. Whereas the overall pattern for women in Britain is that they areconcentrated in the service industries, Asian women are more commonly foundin the low-paid, semi-skilled and unskilled work in the manufacturing sector,particularly in the clothing and textile industries which have recently been indecline. Evidence also shows that even in those industries where womenpredominate, Asian women are concentrated in the lowest level jobs. Unemploy-ment rates among women are much higher compared with white women (Brown1984; Beechey 1986; Bruegel 1989).

In the early phase of post-war migration Pakistani men had arrived predomi-nantly without their female kin. The class position of these men as low wageworkers resident in declining inner areas of British cities was to have a crucialeffect on the nature and type of employment on offer to Pakistani women as theybegan to arrive. Within the framework that I am proposing the argument thatfewer Pakistani women entered the labour market primarily due to 'culturalreasons' would need to be interrogated rather than thrown out of court withoutconsideration. Leaving aside for the moment the question of what these 'culturalreasons' might or might not be, I briefly consider below the impact of timing ofmigration, economic change, immigration control and racism in structuring jobopportunities for Pakistani women.

Timing of migration and post-war socio-economic change

Pakistani women migrated to Britain later than women from India (mostly Sikhand Hindu women). The former arrived mainly in the late 60s and early 70s. Asa consequence Asian women who entered the labour market in the early phaseof the post-war migrations were mainly Sikh and Hindu women. These Asianwomen took up paid employment at a time of ecomomic growth and relativestability. Mass production concentrated in factories, centralised forms of workorganisation and managed national markets were a key feature of this phase. MostAsian women including the small number of Muslim women in employment atthe time found paid work doing semi-skilled and unskilled jobs generated by thisform of production.

There was a fundamental restructuring of the economies of the advancedindustrial societies from the 1970s. The global economy became increasinglydominated by the multinationals, with their new international division of labour,and their greater autonomy from the control of nation states. The decline in theold manufacturing sector, where Asian workers have been concentrated, led toa large scale job loss. Simultaneously there was growth of jobs in the service sector.

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This transition entailed a rise of 'flexible specialisation' leading to moredecentralised forms of labour process and a greater emphasis on contracting outof functions and services. New types of small businesses proliferated within nationaleconomies. There was an increase in low-status, part-time work and a variety offorms of 'home-working' (Mitter 1986; Allen and Massey 1988; Jensen et al. 1988;Hall and Jaques 1989; Phizacklea 1990; Nazir 1991).

It will be evident from the above that Muslim women arriving in Britain inthe late 60s and early 70s would have encountered the labour market in a periodof major economic restructuring and recession. Whilst this resulted in contractionof certain types of jobs, there was an expansion, as we noted, of small businessesespecially those reliant upon the 'putting out' system. The ready availability ofpaid work that could be carried out from home would have appeared a realisticoption to Muslim women with young families to care for. Over a period of time,as homeworking became an established pattern, more and more women were likelyto be drawn into it through kinship and friendship networks. In other words, thegrowing involvement of Muslim women in homeworking during this period couldnot be explained simply in terms of 'cultural constraints'.

The relationship of Pakistani women to the labour market cannot be fullyunderstood without an appreciation of the significance of region and locality. TheSouth Asian groups are concentrated in specific regions. The highest concentrationsof Pakistanis are found in the London and South East region, with substantiallylarge settlements also in Yorkshire, Humberside and in the North West region.Patterns of change in the economy at the regional and local level have been criticalin shaping the structures of job opportunities in specific areas of Birmingham whereour study was conducted. During the 1980s major job losses occurred in the WestMidlands, especially in manufacturing where there has been a concentration ofAsian workers. For example, between 1981 and 1984 Birmingham City declinedtwice as fast as the region as a whole (Birmingham City Council Report). Thedevastating impact of this change on Asian households may be gauged when wenote that according to the 1971 census just over 60 per cent of male workers ofPakistani and Indian origin in the West Midlands worked in the manufacturingindustries. Asian women too have been concentrated in manufacturing, principallyin textiles and clothing. Whilst there has been a relative increase in employmentin the service sector, this is primarily in those enclaves where the Asian workforceis as yet not strongly represented. Moreover, Asian workers have been employedin large numbers in the secondary labour market. Birmingham City Council's 1986Review of Economic Strategy points to an expansion in the secondary sector jobs.The report highlights a steady growth of low-paid employment, and self-employment at lower levels of the income scale. Such local trends circumscribethe nature and type of employment available to young women.

The impact of immigration legislation on Asian families is now well-documented. Social constructions of Asian marriage and family systems as a'problem for British society' have been pivotal in the legitimation of Britishmigration policy. Images of 'tidal waves' of Asian men scheming to circumventimmigration restrictions through the arranged marriage system were commonlyinvoked in the justification of immigration control. Whilst the Asian male wasdefined as a prospective worker posing a threat to the employment prospects ofwhite men, Asian women were defined in immigration law as 'dependants'. The

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social imagery of Asian women as hapless dependents who would most likely bemarried off at the earliest possible opportunity has played an important role inshaping the views that teachers or careers officers might hold of young Muslimwomen's education and employment prospects. Such professionals have animportant role to play in encouraging or discouraging young Muslim women frompursuing certain types of education or employment (Cross et al. 1990; Brah 1992b).

There is now an extensive literature that documents direct and indirectdiscrimination in the labour market in terms of access to employment, promotionand training (cf. Daniel 1968; Brooks and Singh 1978; Brown 1984; Drew et al.1991). Such discriminatory practices are constituted in and through a variety ofracialised discourses that construct the racialised Other in Stereotypie terms asinherently 'different'. Just as patriarchal discourses may represent women's labouras 'different' and/or inferior, racialised discourses call into question the abilities,aptitudes, cultural attributes, and the general suitability of a group for certain typesof jobs and positions within the employment hierarchy. Evidence shows thatteachers, careers officers and employers can all be implicated in practices that havelife-long adverse consequences for individuals (Lee and Wrench 1983; Brah 1986;Cross et al. 1990; Drew et al. 1991).

Images, representations and lived culture

Where Asian women are concerned, racialised discourses articulate with those ofgender and class in the social representations of this category of women in Britain.There is a long history of orientalisms embedded in literature, paintings, drawings,photography, 'scientific' discourse, political debate, state policies and practicesand in commonsense. The 'oriental female', especially the Muslim woman, cameto occupy a position of the quintessential Other in this discursive space (cf. Said1978;). Whether she is exoticised, represented as ruthlessly oppressed in need ofliberation, or read as a victim/enigmatic emblem of religious fundamentalism, sheis often perceived as the bearer of 'races' and cultures that are constructed asinherently threatening to the presumed superiority of western civilisations. But,we should not necessarily assume a one-to-one direct correspondence either betweencolonial representations of groups who were 'orientalised' (Arabs, Turks, Indians,for example, have been orientalised in different ways), or between colonialrepresentations and contemporary discourses. There are continuities as well asdiscontinuities across this discursive field. Hence, social images of Pakistani womenin present-day Britain may in part derive from colonial representations of Muslimsin colonial India but, essentially, they are an integral component of the field ofrepresentation associated with the Pakistani presence in post-war Britain. Suchsocial imagery connects also with discourses of 'the Muslim' in Western Europe.There would seem to be substantial overlap in the available imagery of youngMuslim women in different parts of Western Europe (Parmar 1982; Brah andMinhas 1985; Lutz 1991; Brah 1992a and b).

But how do such images of Muslim or other Asian women affect their employ-ment trajectories? They do so when, as noted above, these stereotypes are translatedin such fields as education, training and employment into practices that haveadverse effects on women's position with respect to the labour market. For

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example, the notion of 'cultural constraints on Muslim women' can come intoplay and underpin a myriad of practices involving teachers, education and trainingguidance providers, recruitment and personel officers and so on. The generalcurrency of such notions on a wide scale through media consumption means thatthey have become sedimented into a collective commonsense. Their influence,therefore, can be multivariate, conscious and unconscious, and insidious. Theireffectivity, however, depends upon the degree, extent and manner in which theyare activated under given economic, cultural and political circumstances.

To highlight the discourse of 'cultural constraints' as ideology is not to denythe importance of culture. But what do we mean when we speak of culturalconstraints? In discussions of Muslim women the 'cultural' constraint that is mostfrequently invoked is the institution of 'purdah' — a series of norms and practiceswhich limit women's participation in public life. It is important to point out thatthis social concept and its manifestation varies from one historical period to another,from one country to another, and from one social group to another. Even withinthe same social group its patterns of observance can differ considerably along class,caste and other dimensions (cf. El Sadawi 1980; Sharma 1980). Nor is thisinstitution specific to Muslims in the Asian sub-continent. Versions of 'purdah'are also observable amongst Hindus and Sikhs. Indeed Sharma (1980) suggeststhat in its broader meaning referring to a complex of ideologies and practices thatshape the nature and form of women's participation in public Ufe the concept mayhave some applicability in all societies. In this sense, the segregation of the labourmarket by gender in Britain, for instance, could be understood as a set of patriarchalideologies and practices that are not entirely different from 'purdah'. Nevertheless,it is important to acknowledge the specificity of Islamic forms of 'purdah' butwithout viewing the institution as fixed and unchanging. What is particularlyrelevant is the specific ways in which 'purdah' manifests itself differently amongdifferent Muslim and other South Asian communities in Britain, and the extentand manner in which it articulates with other British patriarchal ideologies andpractices. The point I wish to stress is that Asian patriarchal discourses and practicesin Britain do not exist outside discursive and material practices that are endogenousto British society; rather, they are articulating configurations that are interwoveninto the fabric of British social formations.

. The lived cultures that young Muslim women inhabit are highly differentiatedvarying according to such factors as country of origin, rural/urban backgroundof households prior to migration, regional and linguistic background in thesubcontinent, class position in the subcontinent as well as in Britain, and regionallocation in Britain. British Asian cultures are not simply a carry over from thesubcontinent, but rather, they are organically rooted in regional and localspecificities within Britain. Hence, Asian cultures of London may be distinguishedfrom their counterparts in Birmingham. Similarly, East London Asian cultureshave distinctive features as compared with those from West London. Of course,there aré commonalities but how these configure would depend upon the particularmodality (of religion, region, language, class, etc.) whose common threads we maybe seeking to establish (e.g. Punjabi cultures have their own specificities comparedwith Gujarati or Bengali cultures). In the everyday lives of women these are notseparate but intersecting and enmeshing realities. They can not be disaggreatedinto 'Asian' and 'British' components. They are fusions such that 'Asian British'

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is a new ensemble created, reproduced or transformed in and through everydaysocial practices. The structural and cultural dimensions we have referred to inthe preceding sections delineate the social terrain in which the everyday isexperienced.

In view of the foregoing it is critical, as I pointed out earlier, to distinguishbetween 'young Pakistani women', as an object of social discourse and youngPakistani women as concrete historical subjects. The latter are a diverse andheterogeneous category of people who occupy a multiplicity of subject positions.As is the case with other social agents, their everyday lives are constituted in andthrough matrices of power embedded in intersecting discourses and materialpractices.

The next section examines how our respondents viewed issues of paidemployment in relation to themselves as well as women in general. We examinethe ways in which women's responses represent a range of strategies of accom-modation, complicity, resistance, struggle, transgression — as they negotiatevarying structures of power in their everyday lives. The aim is to explore howwider social structures are encountered in the lived cultures that the women inhabit.

To work or not to work?

There is growing acknowledgement that paid employment is only one form of work.Although wage labour has existed for many centuries, the almost total dépendanceof households on a wage is a relatively recent phenomenon. In Europe where itis now the dominant pattern, it only dates from the 19th century (Pahl 1988). Itis a commonplace to say that women have always worked. In most societies,however, some of the most demanding work that women perform, viz., housework,childcare, and caring work for other members of the family, is rarely regardedas 'work', such that the notion of 'work' is a now synonym for paid work. Whilstmany women are engaged in paid forms of work, whether inside the house in someform of homeworking or on an employer's premises, the ideology of the malebreadwinner is still pervasive in advanced industrialised societies (cf. Leonard andSpeakman 1986; MCrae 1989).

In less industrialised countries the subsistence sector is comparatively largeand the demarcation between productive work and work for creation of use valuesis less clear. Women may be involved in a variety of tasks which simultaneouslyform part of the market economy and in the production of goods and servicesdirectly for consumption within the household (Beneria and Sen 1981; Young andWalkowitz 1981; Redclift 1985). In South Asia, women perform a wide range ofeconomic activities both inside and outside the home. In urban Pakistan, womenmay work in a variety of professions such as teaching, medicine and social work.Women may also be found in some of the lowest status forms of paid work includingroad and building construction, municipal street sweeping and domestic service.In the rural areas, women are likely to be responsible for the care of domesticanimals and processing of food for preservation and storage; they may undertakespecialised forms of agricultural work such as transplanting of rice, and take partin general sowing and harvesting of crops; and they may weave, sew and producehandicrafts alongside other domestic and childcare responsibilities (Papaneck 1971;

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Nazir 1991). In other words, Pakistani women who migrated to Britain are likelyto have been involved in a variety of economic activities prior to migration. Whatwould be new when they migrated would not be the prospect of 'working' butrather the experience of paid work in an advanced industrialised society.

There is a dearth of research case lore from which to develop a systematic pictureof the labour market realities of young Muslim women. Much of the researchcarried out relates to the migrant generation (Dhaya 1974; Saifullah Khan 1974;Jefferey 1976; Anwar 1979). One exception is a pilot study involving a dozenhouseholds where the author interviewed daughters, mothers and grandmothers(Afshar 1989). In this account, we encounter women employed largely as home-workers, although some women had worked in mills before the birth of theirchildren; or as unpaid workers in a family buisness; and, in some cases, as 'careerwomen'. Clearly, these women were economically active although few would beincluded in formal statistics.

In formulating a strategy for our study we decided to interview five categoriesof women: those who were not seeking paid employment; women engaged in paidwork (both those working on employers premises and the homeworkers);unemployed women; trainees on Government Training Schemes; and students incourses in further or higher education. This range of women were interviewedbecause of our belief that in order to fully understand why some Muslim womendo not enter the labour market we need to know why others already have doneso. Furthermore, it is important to know what perceptions and aspirations arerepresented amongst women enrolled on courses in education and training.

The most striking aspea of the responses we received was that an overwhelmingmajority of the women we interviewed considered that women should have theright to undertake paid work. Irrespective of whether or not they were personallykeen to find employment, this was a consistent echo in the interviews. What isits significance, especially in cases where individual women said that theythemselves were not looking for paid work? I would suggest that this responserepresents a critical commentary on those views that hold women's participationin the labour market to be undesirable. It interrogates the hegemonic claims ofsuch perspectives. Women's earnings were considered by our respondents as anindispensible contribution to the income of households. Equally, paid work wasvalued for offering women a measure of independence, and providing them witha sense of confidence. When performed outside the home, paid work was seenas providing much needed networks of contacts beyond those of family and kinship.Employment outside the home was seen as an antidote to the boredom and isolationof staying at home. Workplace friendships were experienced as a source of fun.From our interviews it was evident that sharing a joke, teasing, engaging in casualbanter, sharing out items of lunch brought from home, gossiping, offering asympathetic ear to workmates experiencing domestic or other problems, sharing'a moan' against employers, etc., were some of the elements that went into themaking of workplace cultures. Contradictions of gender, ethnicity, racism, class,generation, seemed to be played out in all their complexity. Importance attachedby women to workplace cultures is also attested by ethnographic studies of womenin the workplace (cf. Poliert 1981; Westwood 1984).

If the great majority of women emphasised that it was important for womento undertake paid work, why were some of them not seeking employment? All

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the women in this category — both married and single — cited housework andother caring responsibilities as taking up most of their time. The single womenoften had to share responsibility for looking after their younger brothers and sisters,or in some cases, their nephews and nieces. In instances where a mother sufferedill health, the single women had to assume the overall responsibility for thehousehold. There was no doubt that these women perceived housework and otherforms of caring work such as childcare, care of elderly parents-in-law or that ofother members of the extended family, as 'work'.

How can I look for other work, I can't even finish my housework. I have plentyof work to do: wash, iron, make dinner and all that. My mum can't do it becauseof poor health, so I have to do the housework (18 year old single woman).

Housework takes up all my time. There are eight of us at home. Cooking, cleaningthe house, washing clothes, ironing — it never finishes (20 year old single woman).

I have four children, a girl and three boys . . . I have my hands full. Besides,if I did work I would have to place the children in a nursery. That costs morethan the wage I would earn (a young married woman).

Whilst these women are not alone in finding domestic responsibilities onerous,there are two factors that have a particular bearing on this group. Firstly, thesewomen often had responsility for larger than average households, which sometimesincluded members of the extended family. Secondly, domestic appliances suchas washing machines or dishwashers that might relieve the pressures of houseworkwere not a common feature of many households, especially those facing difficultmaterial circumstances in a period of high unemployment. A similar finding isreported by Shaw (1988). It is worth bearing in mind that Pakistani householdsin Birmingham have been one of the hardest hit by job losses in the area. We cameacross families where several members of the household were unemployed. Ofcourse, low income amongst Pakistani families derives also from the concentrationof Pakistanis in low paid jobs.

The family background prior to migration of women who were not seekingpaid work did not differ in any significant way from that of women in employmentor those who were unemployed. The families of the majority of women in all threecategories originate from rural parts of Pakistan. Hence, rural origin by itself cannotbe taken as a sufficient indicator of whether or not young Pakistani women werein the labour market. Nor did marital status emerge as a particularly importantdeterminant of women's propensity to seek paid work. Although single womenwere more likely to be economically active, they were also strongly representedamongst those not seeking work.

One factor that did seem to be significant with respect to our respondentsparticipation in the labour market was their length of stay in Britain. We foundthat the great majority of women who were active in the labour market were bornhere or arrived here as children. In contrast, most of the women who were notseeking employment came to Britain as teenagers and, as a consequence, theirexperience of schooling in Britain was limited. In Pakistan they had attended mainlyvillage schools. In Britain the majority had left school without achieving any formalqualifications, and some experienced difficulty in using English for purposes of

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communication. Such women often perceived their lack of formal qualificationsand their limited facility in the English language as a barrier to 'good jobs'.

Sitting at home you get bored. But finding jobs is not easy. I have to learn Englishfirst.

At the moment I don't know. When I have learnt English and other things I'llsee whether I want to work or not. English is a big problem for me.

These women were not unaware of jobs in the secondary sector, especially in theclothing industry in Birmingham where employers asked no questions aboutknowledge of English or other types of formal qualifications. But the young womencategorised them as 'bad jobs' with low rates of pay and poor working conditions.Such jobs held little attraction for the women since these would merely imposean extra burden on existing demands on their time from other domesticresponsibilities, without any of the advantages of a well paid job with good workingconditions.

We noted earlier that women's position in the labour market is defined notsimply by the structure of the labour market or the needs of the economy butalso by patriarchal ideologies which define women's position in society. Socialnorms about 'women's work' and 'men's work' underpin the unequal divisionof labour in the household, occupational segregation of the labour market bygender, and underlie processes whereby a substantial number of women may neverenter the labour market. Patriarchal ideologies have a bearing on all women inBritain but they may take specific forms in relation to young Muslim women.Notions of 'purdah', as has already been pointed out, vary enormously amongMuslim groups. But where families do wish to observe such norms the prospectof women going out to perform paid work causes deep concern because it is thoughtto signal the inability of men to provide for the economic maintenance of thehousehold. The generalised ideology of male as breadwinner, common in Britainand other Western countries emerges in this particular system of signification as'family honour'. The prospect of young women working away from homeunchaperoned is seen to provide fertile ground for malicious gossip. Such gossipis considered a serious threat to a woman's reputation.

Contrary to the stereotype, however, only about a quarter of our respondentsgave their families' opposition to women holding jobs away from the home onthe grounds of 'izzat' and 'purdah' as the major reason why they were not doingpaid work. When opposition did occur constraints could be quite stringent:

My parents want me to stay at home . . . The relatives are the same as well. Theysay she shouldn't go out . . . I don't even sign on. I think they wouldn't mindme doing homeworking . . . If I was at home they could keep an eye on me. IfI went to a factory they might think I will go somewhere else with a friend, orI might find a boyfriend.

My parents didn't let me out of the house. Straight home from school, do thehousework and stay in. Didn't see my friends. My Mum is stricter than my Dad.Dad used to say 'let them go out', but she wouldn't. She said people would talk.

Patriarchal norms and practices cannot, however, be regarded totally as externalconstraints. Different women may position themselves differently within patriarchaldiscourses. How did those young women who were not looking for employmentlocate themselves in relation to cultural practices that serve to exclude women from

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the labour market? In some cases the young women echoed the gender specificinjunctions that underpin the concept of 'izzat': 'When women work outside thehome it brings "Be Izzti" (dishonour) on the family. I do not think women shouldwork. I would not want a daughter of mine to work!' (translated).

Other women opposed the view which holds that women should not workoutside the home. But their responses to the personal circumstances that had ledto their own exclusion from the labour market differed considerably. Currentlyunable to take up paid work due to the opposition of her parents, one young womanlived in hope that her future husband would be more liberal on die subject. Asecond young woman whose parents had not considered it appropriate forunmarried women to work outside the home, and who was married soon afterleaving school, found that her husband too was not in favour of her finding a job.Feeling isolated and bored at home, she feels quite disenchanted with this aspectof her Ufe. But she is determined to ensure that her daughter gets similaropportunities to her son. Her own Ufe might have been constrained by culturalnorm of male as breadwinner but she is keen to negotiate a different future forher daughter. A third woman who was a twenty-four year old young mother withthree children could not take up employment because of childcare responsibilitiesbut she was planning to train as a nursery nurse when her children were older.Her husband and in-laws were supportive of her job aspirations. It is evident thatyoung Pakistani women who are outside the labour market consititute a diverseand differentiated category of individuals.

Dilemmas of paid work

Muslim women may be under-represented in those forms of paid work which areaccessible to statistical collation. But they are far from absent in the labour market.Evidence suggests, as we noted earlier, that a substantial proportion of these womenmay be engaged in homeworking. Furthermore, Muslim women are also employedin a range of manual, office and clerical, as well as professional jobs in Britain.This range was reflected amongst our employed respondents with three workingin a clothing factory; one was self-employed as a graphic designer; one was aprimary school teacher; another worked for the local authority in a middle-rangeadvisory post; three worked in the voluntary sector, as community workers oradvice workers; and two worked from home as homeworkers. Another twelvewomen were unemployed.

A common characteristic of both employed and unemployed women was theirdetermination to find jobs. They placed great emphasis on the need for womento be economically active:

I think men and women should have equal rights. If men work why can't women.Women are not just there to do the housework.

I strongly disagree with those who think that women should not work outsidethe home. Well, why should they stay at home? Why can't men stay at home?

I think that both men and women should work. You can't live on one person'swages . . . It is important to me not to be dependant on anyone — my Mum orhusband. I am ambitious for myself.

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A substantial proportion of our respondents belonged to families who were fairlyflexible about women holding jobs. In some cases parents had been positivelysupportive of the education and career ambitions of their daughters:

When I decided to look for jobs my parents were not overjoyed. But they didn'tstop me either.

My parents left the choice to me: you can stay at home or go to work just as longas you don't give me a bad name and people can't point the finger.

My parents were very encouraging. They said, 'do what you want to do.'

Where families were initially reluctant, the women used a variety of strategies ofpersuasion to obtain consent, often recruiting the support of sympathetic relativesor family friends to help negotiate a desired outcome. Academic and professionaljobs are especially highly regarded amongst Asian groups. Even those families whomight at first disapprove of a daughter pursuing higher education/professionalqualifications for fear that the young women may become 'wayward' as onerespondent put it, feel quite proud once she has achieved such qualifications.

Economic necessity emerged as one of the most important reasons why womenfound employment outside the home:

At first I didn't work because my parents didn't want me to. Dad is unemployednow. It is hard. I am looking for work now.

Well it is hard because my Mom doesn't really want me to have a job. But wehave been forced to because we've got no money . . . My parents want me tosew at home [homeworking]. Loads of girls my age (17) do it around here. ButI don't want to.

When my father retired of ill health we actually had to support ourselves . . .There's no way my sisters could have got married right — the dowry, the jewelleryand hiring the hall, feeding the guests — all that — without previous employment.

The effects of immigration legislation were also cited as influencing women'sdecision to participate in the labour market. Our respondents argued that the lawdiscriminates against Asians, and the young women are particularly caught up inthis through the 'primary purpose' clause which places the onus on an applicantfrom the Asian sub-continent married to a British born Asian woman to providethe burden of proof that the marriage was not contracted primarily for the purposeof immigration to Britain. The immigration rules also stipulate that a woman (ora man) wishing to bring their spouse over to live in Britain must be able to supportthem without recourse to public funds. Families are often divided across continentsdue to these laws, and the women who wish to sponsor a spouse must findemployment in order to provide proof of being able to support a spouse withoutrecourse to public funds (cf. Sondhi 1987).

Whatever the reasons given for being in the labour market, and irrespectiveof the level of social importance attached to women's employment by individualwomen, paid work was not always experienced as an unequivocal advantage.Managing the 'doubleshift' of domestic work was likely to be exhausting. For manywomen involved in combining these two types of work, the day could start as earlyas 5.00 or 6.00 p.m. In the evening their domestic chores or other activities suchas tasks related to homeworking, may not be completed until 10.00 or 11.00 p.m.(see case studies cited in the report).

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Our interviews with homeworkers support the evidence from other studiesthat points to low wages, insecurity of employment, boredom and isolation,unbearable pressures resulting from sudden deadlines imposed at short notice bysuppliers, and overall lack of employment protection, as characteristic featuresof homeworking (cf. Bisset and Huws 1984; Allen and Wolkowich 1987). Thisshould not be taken to imply, however, that women working from employer'spremises considered themselves as being better off. Indeed, several women workingoutside the home in low waged, non-unionised sectors of the economy complainedbitterly about conditions of work. Any attempts at unionisation of the workforce,they said, could result in dismissal. Fear of 'the sack' was likely to act as a déterrantagainst collective action. As one woman put it, 'They treat you like animals' buteveryone feared 'the sack because you can't get a job that fast'. Whether associatedwith homeworking or with work carried out from employer's premises, poorworking conditions were deplored across the board. Women condemned suchconditions even though they may have no option themselves but to accept suchemployment through lack of choice.

Overall, homeworking was regarded by the women as the least favoured formof paid work. They described it as sheer drudgery and exploitation. They sawit as reinforcing social isolation and leading to loneliness, and in some cases toacute forms of depression. Correspondingly, low skilled forms of 'factory work'or non-manual work were also met with little enthusiasm, although they weregenerally preferred over homeworking. Women wanted 'good jobs' 'with decentpay' and a positive working environment. Yet, they possessed a fairly realisticassessment of the limited range of jobs available to the majority of Asian women.Living in working-class areas of decaying urban centres, women were sensitiveto the structures of the local labour market. They spoke of how homeworking,certain types of factory work or, at best, low-skilled low-paid non-manual workin the service sector had become the norm for Asian girls in the minds of localemployers, teachers, education and guidance advisors, as well as amongst sectionsof the Asian communities. There is not the space here to discuss our respondents'experiences of education, the Government Training Schemes, and the educationand training guidance services. Suffice it to say that it was clear that low expectationsand Stereotypie perceptions of Asian girls, their aspirations, abilities and cultureson the part of educational professionals were seen by the women as a major obstacleto Asian girls' success in the labour market. Also cited as a major obstacle to successwas racism and discrimination in the labour market.

Racism is a problem. It is easier for white people to get jobs. If a white personadvertised a job he would probably want a white person to do it.It is difficult for us. They give the white people jobs first and then us last.There are some white people who do not like Asian people when they see themon the streets they shout abuse and swear words. It makes me really angry. Someemployers don't like to give jobs to Asians.

Conclusion

It can be seen that women's personal narratives show them to be positioneddifferentially within and across a variety of discourses. Whilst a majority of the

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women endorse the view that women should have the right to undertake paid formsof work outside the home, and in so doing challenge patriarchal notions of themale as the breadwinner, other women reinforce patriarchal values. There is noone-to-one correspondence between what they believe and the reality of whetheror not they are actually engaged in paid work, the latter being mediated by a hostof other factors such as the nature and extent of their caring responsibilities, thefinancial circumstances of the household, the structure of oppportunities availablein the local market, encouraging/discouraging attitudes on the part of their'significant others' such as parents, in-laws, and spouses, and processes of racialdiscrimination as they operate in relation to labour markets. Yet their beliefs, idealsand social orientations provide the psychic and social grid from which the minutiaeof everyday life are negotiated. For instance, those women who placed a strongemphasis on the importance of women doing paid work were likely to be persistentin their pursuit of strategies that improved their own or other women's positionin the labour market even if such a goal was to be deferred for a generation andachieved through daughters, or partially gained by supporting friends or femalerelatives. In the case of women who already held jobs, encounters with paid formsof work embodied all the contradictions of gender, class and racism as the womensought to balance the 'double-shift' of combining domestic responsiblities withpaid work, as they came face to face with simultaneously racialised and genderedforms of class exploitation, either as homeworkers or in low-waged occupationson employer's premises, or when they came across racism in professional jobs.In other words, the micro world of individual narratives constantly references andforegrounds the macro canvas of economic, political and cultural change. Thiswould seem to highlight the analytical purchase of the framework I have proposed.

Overall, we found that the young women's relationship to the labour marketwas structured by a multiplicity of ideological, cultural and structural factors, suchas the impact of the global and the national economy on the local labour markets;ideologies about women's position in relation to caring responsibilities and paidwork; women's own social and political perspectives on such issues, that is, howthey might 'feel' as well as 'think' about them; the role of education in the socialconstruction of gendered jobs aspirations, and racism. In other words, structure,culture, and agency; the social and the psychic are all implicated. They are allintegral to the framework of analysis I have outlined.

Acknowledgement

The research was funded and published by the Department of Employment. The ResearchPaper is available from: Research Management Branch, Employment Department, RoomW441, Moorfoot, Sheffield SI 4PQ.

Note

1 The study upon which this article is based focuses upon young women of predominantlyPakistani background living in Birmingham. It is a qualitative study, carried out during1988/89, which involved 55 in-depth interviews with individuals and group discussionswith 50 women in the age group 16-24. The women had family origins in the Mirpurdistrict of Azad Kashmir and Punjab. Most of the families came to Britain from rural partsof the subcontinent, but about a sixth of them had urban backgrounds prior to migration.The young women's parents work mainly in manual occupations (Brah and Shaw 1992).

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