"What immigrants feel immediately is isolation."
- Cecilia Johnson
Last week I had attended an event on women in leadership roles. It was a gratifying evening where I got to meet several interesting and successful women. It is not everyday you come across a 33 year old CEO of a hospital in person detailing her inspirational success story or get to meet women making their headway in politics and in the local councils. As a panel member in a leadership discussion forum, I also got to practice my public speaking skills while conveying my two cents worth on leadership. Though not at my best owing to a dip in my body temperature leaving me shivering and with chattering teeth ( I rather blame it on the air-conditioning vent right above me and not my nerves), my five minutes of the limelight still helped me break the ice with most women in the room and I happened to make some great acquaintances that night.
Once the room was filled, I surveyed the members gathered there and felt a slight disappointment in seeing very few non-Caucasian women in the gathering. In fact there were just a handful of Aboriginal Australian women and only one other Asian women in the crowd. This is a community with a growing migrant population and yet there were hardly any non-Caucasian women in an event representative of budding/recognised female leaders. Well, once the initial surprise died down, my thoughts, though spinning in circles first, later chalked this (in)significant absence to certain prevalent factors.
I tried to recall the initial days after I had migrated to Australia. On day three after landing, I visited Byron Bay, a beautiful beach in New South Wales. Perhaps not the right way to get acquainted with a new country and new culture :) I was the most overdressed person on the beach, talk about culture shock !!! I remember being a shy, frightened, young woman who was intimidated by most things around me - electric trains with automatic doors, ATM cards, getting on public transport, picking up the phone, the Aussie accent..... and so the list continued :) But yet that day, I stood before a gathering of 100 women and still remembered to breathe. I have come a long way but the journey has been an arduous one, despite being memorable at times.
Walking down the memory lane, I realised that before most migrant women can dream of leadership roles, there are some hurdles or rather social barriers one needs to cross. As a first step these women need to be accepted as an equal at the workplace or within the community. In most cases, I have been quite lucky in that aspect. I have had wonderful friends who have welcomed me with open arms despite my ethnicity and foreignness. However I have noticed in certain instances that the first impression that people have of me before I open my mouth is that perhaps I am not capable of stringing words together to form a coherent sentence. Stereotyping, labelling, marginalisation is inherent in any community/workplace, but I believe this is more out of misunderstanding and unawareness than of racism or discrimination. Most migrants irrespective of gender face this issue, with the women perhaps getting a more raw deal given that they take their own time to settle down in a new country.
I have to say from personal experience, life is not easy for migrants in a new country, especially for women. You are not only uprooted from your comfort zone but in most cases you are placed into an entirely new culture. The dislocation - the swinging to and fro between two cultures creates a lot of havoc and chaos. Life becomes a series of compromises and adjustments, with women losing their identities in most cases. The people or social skills that had worked for these women back in their own country perhaps no longer work in the new settings. As a result these women retract into their shells, diffidence becoming a major barrier.
Another common issue that I have noticed among most migrants - I am not entirely sure if this applies to women as well, is that they stick together without assimilating into the mainstream community or into the workplace , creating small ethnic "pockets". Even though this provides a temporary solace for them wherein they are familiar and comfortable with the world that they create, in the long run, it isolates and alienates them.
There is no quick fix for these issues – it takes a lot of awareness, learning and understanding from both sides of the fence. Something else that I would advocate is empathy from both sides. Migrant women need to understand their very strangeness, foreignness can be intimidating to others – can pose issues as people are not aware of how to approach them or include them; they have to learn to integrate themselves into the workplace and at the same time not lose their identity. It is not easy as it sounds as most of us tend to seek validation through other people's eyes - it is easy to lose perspective of your own worth.
I have been extremely lucky in meeting some lovely women in this small community who have been very welcoming and extremely gracious in putting several opportunities my way in helping me integrate into the community and move towards leadership roles. I sincerely hope other migrant women in the community receive the same kind of support to bring them out of their protective shells, as these shells merely turn into hindering barriers in the long run.
I am totally confident that the results will be amazing – the richness that migrant women can bring into the society when given a chance to blossom is totally mind-blowing:) Won't you agree with me??
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