Relational Reflecting and Redoing of Gender Identity Through Migration

Finnish “Techno Wives” in the USA

Bibliographic Data

ID21665864
AuthorsTaina Kinnunen (University of Oulu), Päivi Korvajärvi (0000-0001-9954-8022, Tampere University1)
Year2025
Volume28
Issue2
Pages50-82
Publication date2025-12-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of Finnish Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1206-6516 • E-ISSN: 2831-5081
PublisherUniversity of Illinois Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.5406/28315081.28.2.03
OpenAlexW7161250293
LanguageEN
References cited25

The article considers Finnish “techno wives”: female migrants who had settled in San Diego and Silicon Valley following their husbands’ recruitment by US-based technology companies, such as Nokia, for fixed-term or permanent jobs. We discuss how the women consciously reflected on their culturally internalized ways of “doing gender,” and how they had reoriented their aims, values, practices, and hopes through migration. The study was based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2005 and 2019, including fifteen semi-structured interviews and email discussions. The research material provided a longitudinal perspective on doing and redoing gender in “Finnish” and “US” cultures, and the gendered IT field itself as a context for reflecting on gender. The research participants had relatively high levels of education and significant work experience from Finland, but they had mainly been homemakers while living in the US. Some of them had also worked, either full-time or part-time. At the time of the interviews, most women were still married to the man with whom they had arrived in the US. One-third were divorced and lived with their children or alone. We discuss three different “identity culminations”—empowerment as a mother and spouse, friction in one's professional identity, and the reinvention of the “strong, independent Finnish woman”—that were actualized during the stay in the US, with different individual temporal sequences, emphases, and meanings. Our analysis sheds light on the ways gender is done through social, practical, and affective processes in relation to different economic, cultural, and legislative structures and resources

Doing gender · Ethnography · Field research · Gender identity · Digital Economy and Work Transformation · Emotional Labor in Professions · Work-Family Balance Challenges

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