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Female High-Skill Migration in the 21st Century : The Challenge of the Recession

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posted on 2023-10-11, 14:55 authored by Anna TriandafyllidouAnna Triandafyllidou

‘When I was packing for Greece, I thought that my MBA from Harvard would allow me to easily find a good job in Athens, something like the chief executive officer or, at least, the project manager in a large firm.’ Georgia, who is now 47, moved from Boston to Greece in the mid-1990s, following her Greek husband. Since then, she has been helping her father-in-law with their family poultry business in a small Greek city, switching between the duties of their family-owned shop assistant and that of the housewife. Her co-national Vicky, who had grown up in Washington DC and received the law degree from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), also moved to Southern Europe as a marriage-migrant to reunite with her Italian husband in Rome in the late 1990s and to discover eventually that she ‘has always been no more than a housewife’ there. Like Georgia, she admits, ‘It was not only the new language that I had to master. It was everything: the children, the in-laws, the local economy and the growing corruption. Many doors were closed for me from the very beginning.’ A former business executive from California, Odette, who arrived in Greece only five years ago and who has been unemployed all this time, concludes, ‘It is both very funny and sad to see that our American degrees have not been really demanded here.’

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