Date: 16 Mar 2022 (Wed)

Time: 12:30 – 14:00

Venue: Online via Zoom (Zoom link will be provided after registration.)

Speaker: Ms. ZHOU, Siyuan (Ph.D. Candidate, Gender Studies Programme, The Chinese University of Hong Kong)

Moderator: Prof. SONG, Jing (Associate Professor, Gender Studies Programme, The Chinese University of Hong Kong)

Abstract:

Insurance has been regarded as a highly professional yet service-based occupation in Hong Kong, which has attracted an increasing number of highly educated women who moved from mainland China to Hong Kong based on their cross-border human capital and social capital. Different from female migrant workers who usually take up low-end work in service and caregiving sectors, these highly educated women face new gendered opportunities and obstacles in Hong Kong’s expanding insurance business in the mainland market. This study focuses on female insurance agents who moved from mainland China to Hong Kong and worked under the Immigration Arrangements for Non-local Graduates (IANG). Based on ethnographic observations and in-depth interviews with 32 female insurance agents, this study examines how these women were recruited into the insurance industry, why they made this career choice, and how their work was carried out with mixed feminine and professional characteristics. The findings suggest that despite the seemingly gender-neutral process of recruitment, women tend to be selected into the insurance industry for their assumed feminine characteristics such as empathy and patience, and they may also opt into this workplace due to the evolving gendered social expectations of women’s work and life. These highly educated women struggled to mobilize their cross-border cultural and social capital to develop their professional career, which is meanwhile constrained by their doubly precarious status as female migrants. Their work experiences point to women’s ambiguous position as professional, skilled migrants involved in feminized service work.

Speaker’s Biography:

Ms. ZHOU Siyuan is a Ph.D. candidate in Gender Studies Programme and the Department of Sociology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her research interests include gender and work, migration, and female entrepreneurship. Her doctoral project is about “doing gender” and “doing business” between Hong Kong and mainland China among female IANG insurance agents. 

Language: English

Registration: https://cloud.itsc.cuhk.edu.hk/webform/view.php?id=13646269