Gender, deskilling, and forced migration: A study of the experiences of refugee women in Turkey

Despite its evident challenges, international migration brings countless advantages to both origin and destination countries' economic development by providing a diverse workforce and extending the available skill pool that can timely and efficiently respond to the labor market needs. From the integration-based perspective, refugees and migrants with higher formal skills and qualifications are usually regarded as those who can be easily integrated into the host society and the labor market. However, many skilled and highly skilled refugees often work in jobs for which their skills and qualifications are under-utilized. This issue is conceptualized as deskilling and occurs when their skills and qualifications are not recognized in the countries of destination. Deskilling is associated with brain waste and may hinder the full utilization of refugees' skills and integration processes. There are almost 4 million registered refugees living in Turkey, including 3,65 million Syrian nationals under temporary protection, 46,2% of whom are women. Of the non-Syrian refugee population in Turkey, there are some 330 thousand international protection applicants, mostly coming from Afghanistan, Iran, and Iraq, for whom no gender-based data is available. In Turkey's case, many refugee women received less formal education and/or never experienced working outside the home due to the patriarchal and cultural norms of their home country. In addition to less skilled refugee women in Turkey, there are also those with higher human capital, and even though they are almost equally educated and qualified as their male counterparts, they still make less money. This gendered and skilled aspect of forced migration is yet to be studied at length. Against this background, this thesis aimed to contribute to existing discussions in the literature on deskilling by providing lived experiences and viewpoints of skilled and educated refugee women coming from Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Iran. Adapting a qualitative method, 50 refugee women aged 25 to 55 having at least a bachelor's degree and work experience were interviewed face-to-face, and two focus group interviews were conducted with NGO representatives. The interviews took place in Ankara, Bursa, Istanbul, Mersin, and Gaziantep. Based on the data gathered, barriers and challenges leading to deskilling, repercussions of the phenomenon, and the women's strategies to combat the impacts of deskilling were analyzed. Zygmunt Bauman's conceptualization of stranger and Pierre Bourdieu's metaphor of game were utilized as an entry point for the theoretical discussion. Regardless of their skills, prior work experience, and higher education level, it was detected that many highly skilled refugee women suffer from deskilling, which causes them often work in jobs they are overqualified for. Accordingly, it was discussed that the devaluation of their institutionalized cultural capital is conducted through the barriers and challenges that the host country and professional associations, as well as the patriarchal structure, have employed systematically and deliberately. Those barriers were illustrated as legal restrictions, heavy bureaucratic requirements, lack of knowledge, language barrier, priority given to highly educated men rather than highly educated women, and identity-based discrimination. The most important repercussion of deskilling was not surprisingly marked as the devaluation of their human capital and labor, which excludes them from the upper segments of the labor market with highly skilled and prestigious positions and makes them suffer occupational downward mobility and loss of economic, social, and cultural capital. Moreover, deskilling also confined these women back to the private sphere who had struggled to exist and be visible in their home country by rejecting all interrelated mechanisms of gender-based exclusion and male domination on them due to the existence of authoritarian regimes, long-lasting conflicts and wars, Islamic terrorist organizations, and oppressive patriarchal culture that prevent them from going to university and joining the workforce. Furthermore, even though highly-skilled refugee women are pointed out as key agents for both social cohesion and economic development, it was understood that deskilling hinders their enormous capacity to transform both their ethnic communities and host countries for the better. However, these women are active agents in the game field of Bourdieu, who are able to mobilize the capital that they possess in order to carve out a better position, redeem their human capital, and reposition themselves in the country of destination. They have developed some strategies which were identified as establishing and volunteering for certain civil society organizations, engaging in transnational activities, pursuing further education in Turkey and/or acquiring Turkish language, involving in a religious community, seeking a new way out, such as becoming part of irregular migration flows to move to a third country. To reach their desire to establish a normal life in which they can reconstruct their identity and habitus, this thesis highlights that their experiences and strategies were complicated at the intersection of nationality, ethnicity, city of residence, legal status, and citizenship in the neo-liberal order.