Filipino Women in Australia: Practising Citizenship at Work

Abstract

Filipino women comprise more than half of the Philippine-born population in Australia. They adopt Australian citizenship readily and have high labor force participation. In this article, I examined Filipino women's practice of Australian citizenship in the world of work. Based on in-depth interviews with 36 Filipino women, I adopted feminist conception of citizenship which considers paid work as well as caring work in the domestic sphere. Findings from the study suggest that becoming an Australian citizenship not only provides Filipino women membership in the political community. More importantly, it empowers them to negotiate their subject position as racialized immigrant women in the labor market. Negotiating gender roles in the family, however, is a different arena.