Women on the Move: Analysing the Gendered Governance of Domestic Worker Migration in Malaysia

Although the feminisation of migration has been widely discussed, little attention has been paid to the ways in which implicit bias and gender bias permeates governance systems. This thesis analyses the governance of domestic worker migration in Southeast Asia, with a specific focus on Malaysia, and investigates to what extent, and in what ways, a gendered governance system has developed. Policy actors’ perceptions have been neglected in research on the governance of migration which is problematic as we cannot understand governance without understanding the perspectives of the actors within the governance system. This study seeks to contribute to closing this research gap by adopting an actor-centred approach to look inside Malaysia’s governance system for labour migration. The empirical material comes from 41 in-depth interviews and structured questionnaires with key policy actors in Malaysia and the wider region. Whereas most research on migration governance has analysed governance system ‘outputs’, this thesis looks ‘inside’ the policy-making process to analyse: i) how policy actors within the governance system develop their understandings of the causes and consequences of the migration of domestic workers, ii) how they develop policy narratives based on these understandings, and iii) how gendered ideologies shape actors’ understandings and decisions. Through the development of an organisational perspective on the governance of migration which combines framing analysis with sense-making approaches, this thesis argues that various actors’ intuitive understandings about migration are shaped by ideas about gender and that these strongly influence the ways in which domestic worker migration is categorised and responded to.