‘I Didn’t Realise There Are So Many of Them’: Ethnic Chinese Women in Civic Life in Australia

ABSTRACT

This article explores the under-studied gender dimensions of immigrants’ civic life by focusing on the role of ethnic Chinese women in community-led volunteering in Victoria, Australia. It integrates population-based cross-sectional data from the 2016 Australian Census and qualitative data gathered from ethnographic fieldwork conducted from 2016 to 2019. Census data identifies a more salient presence of ethnic Chinese women than ethnic Chinese men in civic life. Our interviews demonstrate that these women’s civic participation remains patterned and constrained by heteronormative gender norms which extend beyond the private sphere and the workplace to civic life. These empirical findings challenge both the overly optimistic presumption that equates civic presence of migrant women with civic empowerment or emancipation and the overly pessimistic presumption of them as inactive or marginalised civic actors. Taking a relational approach, the article argues that civic engagement among women from ethnic and migrant backgrounds should be studied in relation to, rather than isolated from, divergent gendered experiences in the labour market and domestic sphere.

KEYWORDS:

• Gender
• migrant women
• civic engagement
• migrant communities
• civic life
• volunteering
• ethnic Chinese
• Australia

Introduction

Migration scholars have long noted that civic participation matters considerably to the lived experiences of immigrants and the development of communities and the broader society (Peucker, 2020). And while gender is also widely acknowledged as an essential factor shaping migrants’ migratory experiences (Salih, 2013), existing literature has yet to capture the full range of gendered civic engagement and experiences among migrant and ethnic communities. Earlier research on gendered patterns of civic engagement among migrants and ethnic minorities often draws upon relatively small-scale surveys and offers mixed results as different forms of civic participation are examined (e.g., McIlwaine & Bermúdez, 2011; Preston et al., 2006). Women from ethnic and migratory backgrounds are often conceptualised as more marginalised civic actors in both scholarship and policymaking (Kirk & Suvarierol, 2014; Peucker, 2020). Furthermore, women from ethnic and migratory backgrounds are often depicted as marginalised, oppressed civic actors, and waiting to be emancipated (Ghorashi, 2010).

A popular perception is that for communities from ethnic and migratory backgrounds, women face various obstacles to claiming a presence and influence in civic life (e.g., Kirk & Suvarierol, 2014; Li, 2020; Southby et al., 2019). Particular attention has been paid to women from more disadvantaged backgrounds who often work in low-skilled, precarious, and low-paid sectors and come from cultural backgrounds that are perceived to be more gender-oppressive (e.g., McIlwaine & Bermúdez, 2011; Read, 2015). Such an understanding has driven migrant-receiving countries such as the Netherlands to introduce specific policies that aim at improving migrant women’s rate of civic participation (e.g., Kirk & Suvarierol, 2014). More recent research, however, shows that migrant women play important roles in ensuring the success of community organisations in the Australian context (see e.g., Tsarenko et al., 2022).

This article seeks to enrich existing migration scholarship by analysing gendered civic participation patterns among ethnic Chinese in Australia. We turn to an examination of volunteering, which the Australian Census describes as ‘(t)he provision of unpaid help willingly undertaken in the form of time, service or skills, to an organisation or group, excluding work done overseas’ (ABS, 2016). As civic participation is usually ‘voluntary activity focused on helping others, achieving a public good or solving a community problem … ’ (Zani & Barrett, 2012, 274), we understand volunteering as a key indicator for civic engagement.

Drawing on the 2016 Australian national Census, we first note that ethnic Chinese women are more active in civic participation than either Chinese men or women in Australia more generally. To more fully account for this pattern, we then turn to ethnographic research to explore how participation in civic life is intricately related to gendered norms in the household and labour market. We argue that individual household norms and the gendered structure of the labour market intersect with age, gender, social class, and desires for connectedness and/or social recognition to shape individual motivations for civic participation. This allows us to identify gendered paths to civic life, and gendered strategies for participating in such voluntary activities.

Our study showcases how divergent experiences in the labour market and domestic sphere result in sets of motivations, constraints, resources, and opportunities for migrant women to take part in civic life. Our findings point to a gendered picture of civic engagement that highlights the complex interrelationships of the experiences and practices in households, workplaces, and civic life. It does not identify a uniform impact, but rather demonstrates that both men and women constitute gendered civic agents in civic life as multiple oppressive systems, such as race, gender, ethnicity, class, and sexuality, intersect (Crenshaw, 1989; González & Hill Collins, 2019; Hill Collins, 2002). Furthermore, it sheds light on women’s civic agency, which is often obscured in literature that accentuates their vulnerabilities. We argue that civic engagement among women from ethnic and migrant backgrounds should be studied in relation to, rather than isolated from, divergent gendered experiences in the labour market and domestic sphere. Furthermore, recognition that a broader and more relational approach which analyses how civic engagement is gendered, and how lived experiences in the domestic, labour, and civic spaces are entangled, is central to understanding gendered motivations, constraints, resources, and opportunities for migrant women to take part in civic life. As a collaborative project between two scholars from differing disciplinary backgrounds (migration studies and queer Asian studies), we posit that civic life is a fertile research frontier to explore how gender intersects with ethnicity, age, and class in understanding migrants’ lived experience.

Gendered Civic Engagement

Previous studies have argued how gender is an integral shaping force of civic engagement among ethnic and migrant communities. However, when it comes to the roles of migrant women as civic actors, there are a number of competing narratives. On the one hand, some studies show that migrant women play important roles in community-led volunteering and associations (DeVerteuil et al., 2020; Tsarenko et al., 2022). Their civic engagement is also widely considered as a tool and indicator of successful social integration. More specifically, scholars have shown that, through volunteering, migrant women can better integrate into the social, economic, political, and civic life in their country of residence (Vacchelli & Peyrefitte, 2018). Migrant women are also sometimes assumed to be more active than their male counterparts in civic life given that women in general have a higher rate of volunteering than men (Einolf, 2011; Marshall & Taniguchi, 2012).

There is another strand of more pessimistic literature that highlights the hurdles migrant women need to overcome for civic engagement and the structural disadvantages they face. In particular, a number of studies indicate that immigrant women are less likely to be active in civic engagement due to the various obstacles they encounter (e.g., Kirk & Suvarierol, 2014) or lack of interest (e.g., Kirk & Suvarierol, 2014; Li, 2020). In fact, such studies show that immigrants in general tend to be less engaged in volunteering due to various barriers while seeking social integration (Lee et al., 2018; Peucker, 2020; Read, 2015). Faced with the dual hurdles of traditional gender norms and ethnicity, migrant women often need to overcome additional challenges than their male counterparts to be active in civic life (Southby et al., 2019). Even when these women manage to participate in civic life, their work is more likely to be overlooked, ignored, and under-appreciated (DeVerteuil et al., 2020; Martin, 2014; Tsarenko et al., 2022; Vacchelli & Peyrefitte, 2018).

The civic engagement of ethnic Chinese women in Australia has not yet been systematically examined. Consequently, existing literature may lead one to conceptualising them either as capable and influential actors, or as less active and constrained members of civic society. How can we reconcile these competing discourses? In this article we adopt a relational approach, where volunteering and civic engagement in general represent ‘a set of relational, affective, and material networks of relationships and connectivities’ (DeVerteuil et al., 2020, 921). By adopting a relational approach and contexualising ethnic Chinese women’s civic engagement in relation to the other two major life arenas of the paid workforce and the domestic space, our empirical findings challenge both the overly optimistic and overly pessimistic presumptions of these women’s role in civic life.

The relational approach posited by feminist geographers suggests that civic practices including volunteering are inevitably influenced by a complexity of social and cultural expectations and norms embedded within and across the varying spaces of work, family life, the city, and the state (Cadesky et al., 2019, 375; DeVerteuil et al., 2020). Civic participation is not only shaped by external state policies but also by urban spaces and internal structures within the volunteering sector (DeVerteuil et al., 2020). In the case of migrant women community leaders in Australia, Tsarenko et al. illustrate the importance of migrant women’s institutional work to the volunteering sector. They note that volunteering constitutes ‘an interstitial space connecting the home, the state, and the space of work’ (Tsarenko et al., 2022, 695). Adopting a relational approach illustrates how civic practices among ethnic minorities and migrants are inherently linked with the gendered norms and expectations of other life arenas such as work and family life (Marshall & Taniguchi, 2012, 216–217). The analysis we conduct based on such an approach, in turn, underscores the significance of interlinks of gendered arrangements across life arenas.

Research Design: Integrating Census Data and Ethnographic Data

To garner a more complete picture of the intersections of migrant status, gender, and civic engagement, this article integrates comparative descriptive analysis of the 2016 Australian Census data and thematic analysis of qualitative data collected from long-term ethnographic fieldwork conducted by the first author (Pan) in Chinese communities in Victoria, Australia, from 2016 to 2019. By combining ‘quantitative and qualitative methods that understand gender to be relational and contextual, power-laden, and also dynamic’ (Donato et al., 2006, 13), we provide a better understanding of how gender impacts on the participation of ethnic Chinese women in civic life by contrasting ‘who they are and what they do’ (based on Census data) with ‘what they say and think’ (through the ethnographic fieldwork).

The fieldwork was conducted as part of the first author’s larger study concerning the civic self-organisation practices of Chinese Australians. It has generated a dataset with more than 100 semi-structured interviews with Chinese community leaders and members. In this article, we draw on semi-structured interviews with 26 ethnic Chinese who were actively engaged in civic activities (13 men and 13 women), aged from their mid-30s to their 80s.¹ Among these interviewees, 21 were from mainland China, two from Hong Kong, one from Taiwan, and two from Vietnam. The length of their stay also varies: eight of the interviewees arrived in Australia in the 2010s and had stayed in Australia for between one and 10 years by the time of interview, six for 10–20 years, two for 20–30 years, five for 30–40 years, two for 40–50 years, and three for more than 50 years (see Appendix).

The state of Victoria was chosen as the fieldwork site in this research for two reasons. First, the state is home to a high proportion of Australia’s ethnic Chinese population: some 31 per cent of ethnic Chinese in Australia lived in the state, according to the 2016 Census, and Chinese communities are notably active in local civic life (Pan, 2021). Second, at 54 per cent, the gender ratio of Victoria’s ethnic Chinese population reflects the Australian population as a whole (ABS, 2016). However, it should be noted that the fieldwork conducted in Victoria presents an in-depth, rather than a generalisable, view of the gendered dimensions of civic life among ethnic Chinese.

The interviews were semi-structured, and largely revolved around the subjective experiences and viewpoints of civic engagement from members of local ethnic Chinese communities. Interviewees were mostly recruited using snowballing and network recruitment techniques (Hennink et al., 2010, 91–100). Interviews were conducted in cafes, restaurants, workplaces, and occasionally in interviewees’ residences, according to their preferences. The findings from the interviews were used in the article to explore how gender influences the participants’ civic engagement as well as their reflections on the gendered aspects of civil society. These findings were complemented by informal conversations with members of the Chinese community, participatory observations of various community activities, organisational brochures and annual reports of community organisations, commemorative magazines, news reports, and reports published by social media accounts.

All qualitative materials collected from the fieldwork were entered into Nvivo for coding. Relevant themes were identified through an analytical process involving careful, close reading and re-reading of the data (Hennink et al., 2010). The coding process was undertaken in a reflexive and iterative manner to ensure that emergent themes were well-captured and the analysis rigorous. Ethics approval was obtained and regularly reviewed from the early design stage to fieldwork and dissemination (Ethics approval number: 1646605.1, granted by the Faculty of Arts Human Ethics Advisory Group, The University of Melbourne). Apart from names sourced from openly published materials, all interviewees have been anonymised for privacy reasons. All translations are provided by the first author.

Census data

Based on data from Australia’s 2016 Census, we find that the ethnic Chinese population in general had a lower rate of volunteering (13.3%) than the Australian-born (16.9%) and the national populations (15.5%). This is the case for both ethnic Chinese men and women (see Table 1) and affirms earlier research findings that ethnic minorities tend to be less active in civic engagement than the population as a whole. When we look within responses from the ethnic Chinese community, however, ethnic Chinese women are more active in volunteering (14.9%) than their male counterparts (11.4%). More specifically, 60 per cent of ethnic Chinese volunteers were women, compared with 56 per cent of Australian-born people and 56.1 per cent of the total population. This seems to indicate a more gendered pattern of civic engagement among ethnic Chinese in Australia (see Table 1). This pattern is even more pronounced in ethnic Chinese communities in Victoria, where 67 per cent of those who volunteered were women. What facilitates or enables the greater engagement of ethnic Chinese women in civic life in Australia?

Table 1. Rates of Volunteering in Australia (various cohorts, 2016)

	Australia-born	Ethnic Chinese	Total Australian
Men	15.0%	11.4%	13.8%
Women	18.7%	14.9%	17.1%
Volunteer rate	16.9%	13.3%	15.5%
% women in population	50.5%	53.9%	50.7%
% women in volunteers	56.0%	60.4%	56.1%

Source: ABS (2016)

As Table 2 shows, Census data indicates that most of the ethnic Chinese men who volunteered were employed full-time (41.7%), followed by those not in the workforce (31.7%), and those employed part-time (15.7%). In comparison, only 25.9 per cent of women who volunteered were employed full-time. Most of the Chinese women who volunteered were not in the workforce (38.9%). The implications of full-time employment and heavy domestic engagement for civic participation are, therefore, highly gendered.

Table 2. Voluntary Work for an Organisation or Group by Labour Force Status and Hours Worked, People of Chinese Ancestry in Australia (2016)

	Men		Women
Employed, worked full-time	24,712	41.7%	23,434	25.9%
Employed, worked part-time	9,280	15.7%	21,919	24.2%
Employed, away from work	663	1.1%	1,429	1.6%
Employed, hours of work not stated	394	0.7%	536	0.6%
Unemployed, looking for full-time work	2,270	3.8%	2,502	2.8%
Unemployed, looking for part-time work	3,099	5.2%	5,416	6.0%
Not in the labour force	18,789	31.7%	35,215	38.9%
Labour force status not stated	44	0.1%	99	0.1%
Not applicable	0	0.0%	0	0.0%
Total	59,260	100.0%	90,548	100.0%

Source: ABS (2016)

A gendered division of labour in the domestic sphere also patterns the civic participation among ethnic Chinese. Its impact, however, is more nuanced than the common perception that women’s role as principal carers limits their civic participation. Being free from childcare responsibilities in general increases the chance for both ethnic Chinese men and women to volunteer. Most men and women who volunteered – 72.7 per cent and 67.7 per cent respectively – did not require childcare (see Table 3). However, as Table 3 indicates, child-rearing constrains civic participation, but this is more so for men than for women: when engaged in childcare, women were more likely than men to engage in volunteering. Such gendered differences imply that there is not a simple trade-off between caring responsibilities and civic engagement, and that the issue requires more in-depth and contextualised analysis.

Table 3. Engagement with Childcare by Volunteers of Chinese Ancestry (2016)

	Men	Women			Total
Did not provide childcare	43,077	72.7	61,330	67.7	104,404
Cared for own child/children	12,826	21.6	21,929	24.2	34,759
Cared for other child/children	2,870	4.8	6,117	6.8	8,982
Cared for own child/children and other child/children	251	0.4	829	0.9	1,082
Not stated	237	0.4	347	0.4	589
Total	59,260	100.0	90,548	100.0	149,809

Source: ABS (2016)

In a similar vein, Table 4 suggests that having greater domestic responsibilities (more than 15 hours) reduces the likelihood that both ethnic Chinese men and women will engage in civic life as volunteers. However, notably, when engaged in more hours of domestic work, women were more likely to take part in civic life than men. For women who shoulder disproportionate duties of caring, participation in volunteering and migrant organisations is often done strategically as an extension of their engagement in the domestic sphere.

Table 4. Engagement in Unpaid Domestic Work, Ethnic Chinese Volunteers, Men and Women (2016)

Number of Hours	Male Volunteers		Female Volunteers		Total
Nil hours	3,188	12.9%	2,454	10.5%	5,643	11.7%
Less than 5 hours	9,741	39.4%	7,808	33.3%	17,545	36.4%
5 to 14 hours	9,413	38.1%	9,094	38.8%	18,507	38.4%
15 to 29 hours	1,843	7.5%	3,039	13.0%	4,881	10.1%
30 hours or more	462	1.9%	950	4.1%	1,409	2.9%
Not stated	65	0.3%	85	0.4%	150	0.3%
Not applicable	0	0.0%	0	0.0%	0	0.0%
Total	24,712	100.0%	23,434	100.0%	48,145	100.0%

Source: ABS (2016)

In sum, the data from the 2016 Census points to a gendered civic space within the Chinese community in which ethnic Chinese women had a higher rate of volunteering than their male counterparts. In addition, ethnic Chinese women were even more likely to volunteer than women in Australia as a whole. The Census data suggests that the gendering of civic engagement within the Chinese community is closely related to how engagement in the private sphere and the workplace is gendered, but it does not tell us why and/or how this occurs.

Daily practices and lived experiences in different life arenas, including the domestic sphere, labour market, and civic life, are entangled. It is tempting to interpret the Census data about volunteering by ethnic Chinese men and women as being the result of migration to a society with a perceived stronger civic culture and awareness of gender equality (Chang, 2019; Kirk & Suvarierol, 2014; Warburton & Winterton, 2010). And, while a more gender-equal social environment encourages and enables women to be more active civic actors (Wemlinger & Berlan, 2016), living in a society perceived to be more gender equal does not necessarily lead to the empowerment of women from ethnic and migrant backgrounds. Needless to say, patterns of civic participation within the ethnic Chinese population in Australia display considerable alignment with gendered engagement in the household and workplace and reflect the pervasive influence of traditional gender regimes.

Despite notable transformations in family life in contemporary China (Ji & Wu, 2018; Song & Ji, 2020), gendered family roles are particularly persistent in the institutional arrangements in Chinese culture, where an intensive burden of parenting and caring is placed on women. Ethnic Chinese migrant women in Australia can, therefore, experience a feminisation process due to such norms being widely upheld and practised (Heidenreich et al., 2014). And, as Ho (2006) has convincingly illustrated, it is common for Chinese women to experience de-skilling and downward mobility in the workplace while also being expected to assume more caring responsibilities as mothers and wives in the household.

The greater presence of ethnic Chinese women in volunteering challenges the unduly pessimistic presumption that these women are inactive or less active in civic life than their male counterparts. However, it also risks being overly optimistic if the observed salience of Chinese women in volunteering roles is equated with civic empowerment. As illustrated above, gendered civic participation of volunteering is inextricably linked with gendered arrangements in work and family life. Such linkages continue to pattern and constrain ethnic Chinese women’s civic participation and should not be ignored in analysing their civic engagement. To present a more complete picture of how gendered life arrangements intersect with other factors in ethnic civic life, we now turn to the analysis of the patterns, motivations, and pathways of civic engagement among the ethnic Chinese population in Victoria, as revealed in the fieldwork.

Gendered Motivations for Civic Participation

Turning to our interview data, men and women offered notably different motivations for taking part in civic life. Both a loss of social connectedness and downward social mobility were noted by research participants as major sources of frustration that motivated them to volunteer. The men, however, emphasised that volunteering enables them to regain social status and symbolic capital, while the women placed emphasis on regaining a sense of social connectedness.

Sam, who migrated to Australia in the early 1990s, was the president of several Chinese community organisations at the time of his interview. On hearing that ethnic Chinese women accounted for the majority of those who volunteer in the community, he registered surprise, saying ‘I didn’t realise that there are so many of them’.² He then clarified that ‘well, it actually makes sense. More community leaders are men, but women often make up the majority of the membership’. When commenting on gender differences in the civic sphere, Sam bemoaned the fact that men were more motivated to gain leadership than act as supportive volunteers: ‘the desire for social recognition is a strong drive for men to actively participate in the civic space, as they want to have people recognise them as important figures of the community’.

Observations of, and interviews with, Chinese community members suggest that men tend to more acutely feel the pain associated with downward social mobility and the loss of symbolic capital in migratory processes (Ong, 1999, 100). James, who was planning to establish a Chinese business association at the time of his interview, is a case in point. Reflecting on his experience as a migrant, James sighed deeply and lamented that: ‘I was doing well in China, so how did I become such a nobody, even worse than a nobody, here in Australia?’ Sam’s and James’s comments point to the role of gendered expectations in motivating and shaping Chinese immigrants’ civic engagement.

Compared to their male counterparts, women who were interviewed were much more likely to mention a loss of social connectedness. As research on Taiwanese women migrating to Australia has shown, the ability to build new social networks while maintaining pre-existing ones is key to achieving a satisfactory experience of migration (Krajewski & Blumberg, 2014). For migrant women (as the cases of Jane and May below illustrate), community-based volunteering is often undertaken as a means of overcoming the anxiety arising from social isolation and of regaining social connectedness.

Jane migrated to Australia five years before the interview to join her son who had settled in Australia. Jane said she felt isolated before she joined the Chinese seniors’ club at which she volunteered. Being new to Australia and not fluent in English, she was concerned to go outside alone by herself and thus often stayed at home when her son went to work. Jane explained that ‘previously when I stayed at home, I had no-one to talk to and felt very lonely and miserable’. She then laughed and said that she had become much happier after joining the seniors’ club and had even regained some of the weight that she had lost after coming to Australia.

May, another volunteer from the club for which Jane volunteered, also mentioned an improved sense of happiness because of increased social contacts. Kahana et al. (2013) highlight the benefits of engagement with civil society for elderly people, and this is reflected in May’s comments that volunteering for the club enabled her to make friends so that she did not feel like her life in Australia was all about her family.

As these excerpts illustrate, the men interviewed tended to describe their motivation for becoming involved in volunteering as stemming from a loss of social status, but the women related civic engagement to a desire for social connectedness. This was particularly salient for women who had migrated to Australia at a later stage in their lives, thus demonstrating the intersections and compounding effects of age, migration status, ethnicity, language, and gender.

Gendered Inroads into Civic Life

In addition to differences in their motivations for civic engagement, ethnic Chinese men and women also have different pathways to civic life. To make room for their civic engagement, ethnic Chinese women often mobilise a range of resources to reduce the demands of what are often framed as their traditional gender roles as wives, and particularly as mothers. This illustrates how gender constitutes one factor, albeit an important one, in contributing to civic life, and how it often intersects with other factors in patterning civic engagement.

The division of labour within a household affects volunteering (Southby et al., 2019). Several interviewees specifically mentioned that civic participation was made possible by supportive families and social networks that helped to alleviate caring responsibilities in the domestic space. In general, migrant women with partners who shared housework responsibilities and took care of the household were more likely to become involved in civic life. For example, appreciation of her supportive husband was central in Ella’s account of her civic engagement. Such support included not only an open-minded attitude towards her civic participation but also active sharing of domestic work:

You know that if a woman is too active outside of the family, some conservative people would criticise her for paotou lumian [a traditional Chinese idiom which means exposing oneself (particularly women) too much in the public]. My husband never thinks this way. He also helps a lot with taking care of me and the family. However late I come back home, there will always be dinner prepared for me.

Resolving the tensions of time and energy allocated to the domestic and public spheres is an unavoidable and persistent hurdle for Chinese migrant women with civic aspirations. Apart from their spouses, Chinese migrant women also turned to their parents and friends for support. Helen, who is a single mother and the president of a Chinese women’s association, described how she made strategic arrangements and mobilised support from her social networks to alleviate pressure from parental responsibilities and make room for her civic engagement. She mentioned that her son was attending primary school when she first started to volunteer. She rented a house just opposite the school that her son attended, so that she did not need to drive him to school each day. After school, she asked a friend, another single mother who lived next door and had a son of a similar age, to take care of her son before she returned home. During school holidays, her parents also helped take care of her son. Helen’s story points to a common strategy that Chinese migrant families have adopted for child-rearing: the use of intergenerational family support (Song & Ji, 2020).

As Song and Ji (2020) have noted, the coexistence of familism and individualism has resulted in profound changes in family and gender relations in contemporary China. Men tend to pursue both self-realisation and family solidarity and are socially encouraged to do so. Women, however, often ‘face a difficult trade-off or tremendous pressure to balance their individual and family well-being, which often requires greater family and intergenerational support or women’s compromise’ (Song & Ji, 2020, 2). Intergenerational arrangements are common in many families where both the husband and wife are wage earners (see e.g., Sun & Mulvaney, 2023). After having children, many young, migrant ethnic Chinese parents invite their parents (usually their mothers) to come to Australia and help with child-rearing. This type of intergenerational and transnational collaboration in raising children has profound implications for Chinese migrant women’s presence and engagement in civic life as volunteers.

Based on our participant observation, grandmothers who come to Australia to help with child-rearing account for a significant proportion of civic volunteers. A case in point is Amelia, who was in her 60s at the time of the interview, and who was an active participant in a Chinese neighbourhood association. She often came to the venue at around 1pm and left at around 3pm every day. Amelia explained that she came to Australia shortly after her daughter gave birth to a baby three years earlier, because:

my daughter needs me. [At that time] She just gave birth to a baby and her career just started to take off. I was thinking … I had retired and have nothing important to do. I would feel guilty if I did not come and help her out.

Amelia’s account illustrates the gendered and generational dynamics at play in shaping women’s presence and engagement in the domestic sphere and the workplace. The intergenerational arrangement of responsibility and duties demonstrates the tensions and dilemmas faced by Chinese women in attempting to realise the gender ideals that denote both ‘family responsibility and individual self-fulfilment’ (Zurndorfer, 2018, 491). Upon seeing her daughter’s difficulties of simultaneously meeting the expectations of family responsibilities and career development, Amelia decided to come and help relieve the burden of caring for her baby and individual self-fulfilment. While coming to Australia to assist her daughter was a choice that Amelia made voluntarily, she also lamented losing contact with her social life and the comforts of retirement:

In China, I had a group of friends who are also retirees. We met up regularly, exercising, shopping, and travelling around. We even have our own square dance team [laugh]. [Therefore] To be honest, I was also reluctant to come here. I do not know anyone here and have no friends to hang out with.

Amelia’s daughter ardently supported her mother’s participation in civic life as a way for her to enrich her social life and rebuild social networks in Australia. Such civic engagement can thus be seen as an intergenerational arrangement made to care for the physical and mental well-being of the elderly. This seems to be an interesting contrast with earlier research that suggests Chinese culture discourages the elderly from volunteering because it might imply that their families were not taking care of them (Warburton & Winterton, 2010). According to Amelia:

[My daughter] is very considerate, always saying that you should go outside and have fun. So she found this association for me in the neighbourhood and signed me up. It’s pretty convenient and fun. I can come here after making lunch and then spend the afternoon here before picking up the kid from school.

Amelia’s choice of words, facial expressions, and body language in her interview suggest that social networks beyond the family and engagement in civic life, whether in China or Australia, are valued as sources of happiness. Participation in civic life is often perceived as a means to an end and instrumental motives surely matter, but volunteering can be a fun and engaging experience that is sought in its own right as well. Nevertheless, Amelia downplayed these non-family- and non-work-related activities as ‘nothing important’ compared with helping her daughter to fulfil her family responsibilities and self-realisation in her career.

The gendered civic participation patterns among Chinese immigrants are also patterned by life stage. As ethnic Chinese women enter a later stage of life with fewer household responsibilities, particularly when child-raising finishes, they also become very active in volunteering. A study of Colombian migrants similarly suggests that ‘women’s political engagement was easier when demands on their traditional roles, as mothers in particular, were lessened later in the life course’ (McIlwaine & Bermúdez, 2011, 1499). This is also reflected in the comments made by Jane and Helen, who were introduced earlier. When asked about when her civic engagement began, one community member in her late 40s, Tina, said:

I started to actively join the various [Chinese] clubs in recent years after my son went to college. Actually, it is not like I only started now. Earlier, I also participated in a few community events about parenting and education, like those about how to help your child to achieve higher academic scores. But now it is different.

When she was asked to elaborate why ‘it is different’, Tina paused and explained: ‘I kind of feel like I was more like my son’s mom. But now, I am more like myself. I have more time for myself and join groups that I like’.

Interviewees often reported the fulfilment of family responsibilities as a prerequisite for civic engagement. For more privileged and financially stable Chinese migrant women, one pathway to participation in civic life was paid childcare. Terrassa Chen,³ one of the most influential Chinese community leaders in Victoria, alluded to this in an interview for a popular Chinese TV programme. Terrassa established a Chinese hometown association in the mid-1990s and has been its president ever since. Due to her devotion of time, money, and energy, the organisation has become one of Victoria’s biggest Chinese community associations. In her interview, Terrassa explained how she managed to devote so much time to her career and civic causes after giving birth to her youngest son: ‘ … I did not raise him. Not even one day. He was fed with baby formulas and taken care of by a nanny … ’ (cited in Chen, 2016). This reflection underlines the importance of childcare assistance in alleviating Terrassa’s household responsibilities and making her civic presence and success possible.

Beyond the immediate family and community contexts, the broader social, political, and cultural structures in the host society also shape Chinese migrant women’s civic engagement. Fieldwork observations suggest that Chinese migrant women tend to have a positive outlook on the gender-culture in Australia. Several interviewees said that they perceive Australia as a country that is particularly devoted to eliminating gender inequality and paying attention to women as a distinct social group who should be recognised and protected. Those who wish to participate in civic life consider this a favourable opportunity structure to facilitate their engagement. For instance, Helen said that ‘You can say that we [women] have some kind of advantage. Australian society is more equal, free, and democratic. They have given females platforms such as the Victoria Women’s Association, in which Chinese men are not entitled to participate’.

Such perceptions of the host society’s favourable structure have also encouraged migrant women to build social ties beyond their ethnic communities. After establishing a Chinese migrant women’s association, Helen applied for organisational membership of the Victorian Women’s Association. She said that joining a mainstream women’s association extended her networks and offered opportunities at the local, national, and even transnational levels:

After joining the association, I found that the Victorian Women’s Association is a great place. Not only is there a Victorian Women’s Association, there is an Australian Women’s Association, which is connected with the International Women’s Association. You can reach out and connect with women from nationwide and worldwide, so that we can present the [positive] images of ethnic Chinese women.

There was, nonetheless, no consensus among interviewees about whether Australia affords greater gender equity. As Joey remarked pertinently, migrating to Australia required her to devote more time to the domestic sphere:

It is hard to say whether Australia has provided more opportunities for women here. In China, work-related stress is indeed overwhelming. But there is little housework to do. We all dine out, which is really suitable for people like me, who like working but not doing housework.

These comments challenge the stereotypical understanding of non-western socio-cultural contexts as gender oppressive and the western one as more gender equal (Kirk & Suvarierol, 2014), which casts more doubt on the assumption that migration to Australia is gender emancipatory. Some participants who care for children while working put more emphasis on working to provide for their children. In these instances, civic engagement was strategically deployed to enrich their social life, lessen their parental duties, and give way to paid work that brings financial income. For example, Zoe noted that:

I do not mind working harder and even propose to my boss that I can work overtime. But my boss said he does not have the money to pay me. To be honest, what I want is to make more money for my children to live better lives.

Instead of viewing Australian society as emancipatory, Zoe was concerned about the high cost of childcare in Australia and that she might need to quit her job so that she could care for her child:

Before, I do not understand why so many Chinese and even Australian women will stay at home to take care of their kids. I cannot imagine myself being financially dependent on my husband. But now I understand, because sometimes, what you earn is not even enough to pay for the childcare fees. Childcare here is just so expensive!

The analysis to date has showcased the range of pathways by which Chinese migrant women become civic actors and take on roles in civic life. Their ability to do so is closely related to how they negotiate the gendered division of responsibilities within their households and how they navigate the external structures that offer such opportunities. The roles of life-stage, class positions, and contexts of reception in framing migrants’ political and civic participation (Harell, 2017; McIlwaine & Bermúdez, 2011) are relevant here. In addition, our discussion shows, the influence of these factors is always contextualised in the gender regimes that are imposed on, or incorporated into, the lives of migrants.

Gendered Strategies: Domesticating Civic Engagement

The gendered nature of migrant civic engagement was also evident in the types of civic activities that Chinese migrant women in this study undertook. The most popular forms of self-organisation among these women were neighbourhood associations. Typically, these associations organise regular social gatherings in members’ houses, venues provided by local city councils, cafes, or other public spaces in the neighbourhood. Our observations of these activities suggest that these associations constituted an extra-familiar social space, but discussions within these groups were often dominated by the concerns that people had in the private sphere. For example, family relationships, romantic relationships, and children’s education, rather than career advancement, were most commonly discussed in their meetings.

Taking domestic concerns to the neighbourhood represents a typical gendered form of civic engagement among immigrants. Such an approach, which may be referred to as a domesticating approach to civic engagement, has been observed in immigrant groups in other settings. For instance, de Wilde (2017) highlights how migrant women in the Netherlands strategically domesticate and feminise the neighbourhood as a space in which to comfortably share family life, concerns, and experiences in the private sphere.

The neighbourhood association of Chinese women, of which the first author had been a participant observer since 2016, was an example of this ‘domestication of civic life’. The group organised monthly gatherings, which were often held in the living rooms of members and sometimes in community function rooms provided by the local council. Often members who participated in the gatherings brought a homemade dish and spent the afternoon together, discussing family relations, health issues, and work experiences. When the author asked Mary, the leader of the group, why it was a women-only group, one participant explained that:

All the events we have are for women. We share and discuss about things about women’s lives. Why should we have [men]? They would not be interested and comfortable here and we do not feel comfortable with their presence either. [In that case], we cannot freely talk about everything we want to share.

Unlike many other social networking community events in which the first author had participated, the gatherings rarely featured clear themes and structured events. Rather, they were oriented towards strengthening bonds within the group and providing a homely, relaxing, and cosy environment for social and emotional support. Geographical proximity also contributed to the popularity of neighbourhood associations as a civic space for Chinese migrant women. Alice, a mother of two school-age girls, said that since household chores took up a lot of her time, it was less time-consuming and thus more practical for her to join a neighbourhood women’s group. This illustrates that the closeness of a safe space in which to receive support was paramount to the women participating in these neighbourhood groups.

The performance of traditional gender roles that transcends the neighbourhood settings is also evident in other forms of civic practice that Chinese migrant women undertake. Culture was commonly noted by women interviewed by the first author as another major motive for their engagement in civic life. For instance, when Jianmei Lu⁴ was asked in an interview with SBS why she had founded the Australia Chinese Chi-Pao Association, she referred to her role as a mother who wanted to pass on Chinese culture to the younger generation:

When I came here, my child was still young … sometimes when I look at my daughter, I became very anxious. We are Chinese, how can Chinese forget all of our traditions? Because of this anxiety, and as a mother, I felt a sense of mission and responsibility. I felt I need to do what I can to promote our culture (cited in SBS, 2015).

Lu’s comments illustrate how Chinese migrant women draw on their social reproductive roles to claim and justify their civic participation: they associate being civically active with being a mother, and transmitting ethnically specific cultural values and heritage to the younger generation. As noted, the public sphere is normally conceptualised as men’s space in traditional Chinese culture. Not surprisingly, community leadership has largely been a stereotypically male domain among overseas Chinese, with men more likely to take on leadership roles (Wu & Wang, 2007). As such, Chinese migrant women who want to be involved in civic life and lead their communities often need to justify their presence in this traditionally male-dominated space. Favourable social recognition of their civic engagement is often conditional on their fulfilment of their traditional roles as mothers, wives, caregivers, and homemakers. This is also integrated into Chinese migrant women’s self-evaluation, as was noted in a documentary series about the lives of ethnic Chinese migrants in Australia (Terrassa’s Diary 2). Towards the end of the documentary, Kate,⁵ the president of a widely influential Chinese hometown association, said:

I use this documentary to show my feelings to my family and my child. I hope she [my daughter] can watch this when she grows up and get to know that Mummy has always loved her and that everything Mummy does is for the family.

Kate expressed a sense of indebtedness to her family and child, which illustrates the stresses and anxieties Chinese migrant women often experience while positioning themselves as civic beings and seeking to balance civic engagement with household responsibilities. This sense of indebtedness derives from women’s aspirations to participate in civic life and the imposition and/or internalisation of gender schemes that prioritise their roles as virtuous wives, caring mothers, and successful homemakers.

Paradoxically, while assuming roles in civic life itself reflects the agency of ethnic Chinese women, their civic participation often tends to put pressure on their obligatory roles in the domestic sphere and reinforces the stereotype of them as child-bearers, educators, and even the bearers of Chinese culture. Similar to Vietnamese migrant women facing the stigmatisation of ‘bad motherhood’ and ‘failed femininity’ (Hoang, 2020, 307), Chinese migrant women often find themselves questioned as to whether they have achieved success in civic life at the expense of the well-being of their families and children. Having happy families and successful children is still crucial to the social validation that Chinese migrant women can receive, so it is unsurprising that female community leaders are much more likely than their male counterparts to mention their familial concerns, cite the support they receive from their family, and note their successes in the domestic sphere.

Conclusion

Through its empirical study of the gendered aspects of civic engagement among the ethnic Chinese population in Australia, this article has contributed to the scholarship on migrant communities by shedding light on their gendered dimensions. Our research has identified that ethnic Chinese women have a more salient presence than men in community-led volunteering among the ethnic Chinese population, which calls into question the pessimistic conceptualisation of such women as inactive or less active in civic life. This is consistent with recent research on migrant women’s importance to volunteering (DeVerteuil et al., 2020; Tsarenko et al., 2022, 695). Adopting a relational approach, our research also shows how ethnic Chinese women’s active participation in volunteering remains patterned by heteronormative gender norms that extend beyond the private sphere and the workplace and into civic life.

Our findings challenge both overly optimistic and overly pessimistic presumptions by showcasing how ethnic Chinese women remain constrained by their gender roles despite being more active than their male counterparts in volunteering. Consequently, civic engagement should not be disconnected and isolated from work outside the home and/or family life. We argue that overly optimistic interpretations of high levels of civic participation as reflections of and drivers for women’s empowerment or emancipation are not warranted. Doing so overlooks women’s structural precariousness within and beyond civic life. This research therefore advocates for a broader and more relational perspective in understanding civic engagement among migrants, one that not only analyses how civic engagement is gendered but also how lived experiences in domestic life, the labour market, and civic life are entangled and interrelated, and subject to the prevailing influence of gender and ethnicity.

Beyond its widely acknowledged socio-political implications (Peucker, 2020), civic engagement has the potential to open new spaces and avenues for addressing household concerns, regaining social connectedness, and achieving self-expression, realisation, and public advancement. However, ethnic Chinese women’s civic engagement is still heavily marked by domesticity and alignment with traditional gender roles, is focused on personal, household, and community betterment, and rarely engages in broader social movements. In this sense, the civic potential of ethnic Chinese women remains constrained despite their active participation. Policies to enhance civic integration should therefore consider the rate of participation as well as its specific forms and pathways so as to truly ‘emancipate’ the civic potential of migrant women.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank all who contributed to and participated in the interviews. We would also like to thank the editors and the anonymous reviewers for their constructive and insightful comments that have strengthened the article.

Disclosure Statement

The authors report no potential conflict of interest.

Additional information

Funding

This article did not receive any external funding.

Notes

^1. While we note the importance of highlighting gender beyond a strict cisnormative binary, ‘woman/women’ and ‘man/men’ were the preferred terms used by the research participants. In some instances, ‘female’ and ‘male’ are used in reference to Census data; these terms are not used to indicate that gender is a binary biological given (Fausto-Sterling, 2012). The 2016 Census is the first Australian Census to incorporate an ‘other’ response option in addition to ‘male’ and ‘female’ as a means of capturing statistics on sex and gender diversity.

^2. All translations are by the first author (Pan) unless otherwise noted.

^3. Terrassa is not one of the interview participants and the quotes are sourced from the media.

^4. Jianmei is not one of the interview participants and the quotes are sourced from the media.

^5. Kate is not one of the interview participants and the quotes are sourced from the media.

Appendix

Table

Pseudonym	Gender	Place of Origin	Date of Interview	Length of Stay in Australia
Peter	Male	Mainland China	3 August 2017	30–40 years
Sam	Male	Mainland China	28 October 2018	10–20 years
Mary	Female	Taiwan (China)	1 November 2016	40–50 years
Tom	Male	Mainland China	7 December 2017	10–20 years
Alice	Female	Vietnam	4 March 2018	40–50 years
Jack	Male	Vietnam	25 March 2018	20–30 years
Charles	Male	Mainland China	4 June 2018	10–20 years
Harrison	Male	Mainland China	7 December 2017	10–20 years
Simon	Male	Mainland China	13 May 2017	1–10 years
Jane	Female	Mainland China	11 September 2016	1–10 years
Tina	Female	Mainland China	9 October 2016	1–10 years
James	Male	Mainland China	17 May 2017	20-30 years
May	Female	Mainland China	22 April 2016	1–10 years
Ella	Female	Mainland China	6 March 2016	30–40 years
Allan	Male	Hong Kong (China)	7 March 2018	> 50 years
Melisa	Female	Hong Kong (China)	10 April 2018	> 50 years
Kevin	Male	Mainland China	10 April 2018	> 50 years
Helen	Female	Mainland China	13 April 2018	30–40 years
Joey	Female	Mainland China	14 April 2018	1–10 years
Henry	Male	Mainland China	28 October 2018	30–40 years
Amelia	Female	Mainland China	6 August 2017	1–5 years
Ziggy	Female	Mainland China	26 July 2018	10–20 years
Lily	Female	Mainland China	11 September 2018	10–20 years
Fred	Male	Mainland China	6 September 2017	1–10 years
Francis	Male	Mainland China	13 January 2017	30–40 years
Zoe	Female	Mainland China	11 June 2017	1–10 years