Women migrant workers

Changing Attitudes and Behaviour Towards Women Migrant Workers in ASEAN: Technical Regional Meeting

This report sets out key areas of learning from the meeting, analyses why communication can be an effective tool for changing attitudes and behaviours, and explores some tools and approaches used to enhance communication for behavioural change.

Women make up 42.4 per cent of migrant workers in Asia. Yet, gender inequalities and sexism are perpetuated through migration for work, manifesting in discriminatory attitudes, perceptions and behaviours towards women migrant workers. Such xenophobic, paternalistic, victimizing, and sexist attitudes attitudes and perceptions around women migrant workers can result in women being directed into jobs considered low skilled and of low value, can increase their risks of facing violence and can also detrimentally influence policies on labour migration and violence against women. Therefore, shifting employer, family, government and general public perceptions of migrant women workers is urgently needed. Communication is a critical tool for creating this change.

To identify the key negative attitudes and behaviours that face women migrant workers and to share good practices in using communication to change attitudes and behaviour, a regional meeting on changing attitudes and behaviour towards women migrant workers in ASEAN was organized in 2018 by the EU-UN Safe and Fair programme and implemented by the International Labour Organization (ILO) and the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women (UN Women).

This report sets out some of the key areas of learning from the meeting, setting out why communication can be an effective tool for changing attitudes and behaviours; exploring some of the attitudes that have resulted in negative behaviour and policy around migrant women. It further explores some tools and approaches used to enhance communication for behavioural change.