Asian Immigrant Women and their informal work in Canada:The Process of change
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Highly educated immigrant women from Asia choosing to work for cash in Canada is an indicator of the fact that their employment and economic outcomes are not positive. Drawing from the empirical study, this paper discusses the reasons for work choices and outcomes of this work on immigrant women. Research Focus and Purpose My doctoral research focuses on immigrant women from Asia and their work experiences in the informal sector in urban Canada. Under the term “informal sector” a broad range of work activities takes place in different spaces and locations. In this study, the focus is on women involved in cash-based work at home or in their neighborhood. The reason immigrant women from Asia are selected for this study is because in the last two decades, the majority of immigrants who came to Canada are from Asia and over half of those are women. Immigrants are identified as crucial for the socioeconomic development of Canada (Chui, 2012). However, research on immigrants and their employment experiences reveals that the labour market is highly inaccessible for the immigrant population, especially female immigrants of color, regardless of their previous educational and employment achievements (Guo, 2009; Mojab, 1999; Maitra, 2011). Trying to find alternatives to formal employment and the need for economic survival situate immigrants in a difficult position. The rationale behind choosing this specific population and topic for this research was that cash work is often invisible and is underresearched from a developed countries context. Furthermore, immigrant women's work in the informal sector is an important area to study, as it reveals how, why, and where informal work occurs, and how it is shaping their lives. Highly educated immigrant women with and without professional work experiences from their home countries choosing to work for cash in Canada, is an indicator of the fact that they are going through a process of change. In the actual research, I have focused on three levels or aspects of change that occur in the life of immigrant women as a result of transnational migration. In this paper, to keep the focus on informal work specifically, I am only discussing one aspect of this change, that is the informal work choices, outcomes and learning for immigrant women of this study. The main activities that participants at the time of interview were involved in included child minding, catering, beauty care, cleaning, ethnic garment selling and community work. Theoretical Framework In order to develop an analysis of the various dimensions of immigrant women’s everyday life and work and the process of change, I draw from various theoretical strands and 17 All economic activities outside the formal Institutional framework is considered informal.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.030 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".