The price of ‘extra layers’: British Muslim women’s work and career

In this chapter, the relations between Muslim migrant women's bodily appearances at Western workplaces, their work choices and career development are examined through the lens of embodied intersectionality. This chapter draws on exiting research reports and empirical research to also reflect on the scope of Muslim female migrants' labour market integration in the United Kingdom.

For Muslim women, wearing ethnic or religious dresses such as headscarf/‘hijab’, ‘niqaab’ or ‘burqa’ represents the quintessential identity of women belonging to their particular ethnic group or religion. These highly visible social and cultural markers are also inherently gendered. This chapter delves into understanding how Muslim migrant women wearing ethnic/religious dresses experience/encounter Western workplaces and how their embodied intersectional identities through creating barriers at the workplaces impede the process of their labour market integration, in turn, limit their work choices and further restrict their career progression/development in the long run. The discussion also shows that attention to the Muslim migrant women's workplace experiences funnelled through the process of embodied intersectionality can expose the overall racialised and gendered practices of the society, different forms of social exclusion while simultaneously indicate resistance from and agency of these Muslim women through bodily appearances in transnational contexts. This chapter also sheds lights on how these women's career and workplace experiences need to be understood outside the stereotypical Western description of gendered workplaces and how the discussion needs to be broadened in scope and encompass the spatial dynamics of migration, religion, gender and ethnicity to be able to make sense of Muslim migrant women's work choices and career in the West.

This chapter has a twofold structure – first, it looks at the relationship between self-regulating agency and voice and understanding of the embodiment of intersectional identities by the women themselves in the host country's society and labour market, and, second, how the changing time, space and contexts interact to play a role in terms of the host society and its labour market's acceptance and level of tolerance shown towards this group's embodied intersectional presence.