The previous two chapters examined context-specific aspects and identified work and career mobility patterns of European migrants in Singapore and Tokyo. There is another common element in the EU Generation’s narratives of employment in Asian global cities. This is their perceived and ascribed ‘Other’ identity, especially when such otherness intersects with gender. While there are parallels in the way migrants’ otherness affects their professional trajectories in Singapore and Tokyo, gender marks an explicit difference between migrants’ experiences in both contexts and thus warrants particular examination. This chapter applies an intersectional lens and thereby complicates the findings of the previous two chapters. The comparative discussion of Europeans’ intersecting gender, ‘race’, class, age and generational identities reveals dynamics that confront, and sometimes challenge, conceptions of whiteness in Asian knowledge economies as well as gendered trajectories among highly educated migrants.

Intersectionality theory goes back to Black women’s attempts to raise awareness for the suppression of those who fall into several, overlapping and intersecting categories of weakness or powerlessness, specifically the categories of blackness and of women (Crenshaw, 1991; McCall, 2005). The field of intersectionality has become highly popular since and has diversified and developed into different approaches and objectives. The way I use intersectionality in this book is in one of its more recent derivatives, that is, as ‘a mode of analysis or an approach to understanding the world’ (Hancock, 2016, p 21). In other words, this chapter closely examines how several categories of difference applicable to the EU Generation affect their work experiences and professional trajectories in Singapore and Tokyo.

The following section explores the contents of the EU Generation’s otherness – an ascribed and self-defined identity – by drawing from the concept of passive whiteness (Hof, 2020a). It demonstrates that the symbolic value of being European and White varies by fields and contexts. While in Singapore whiteness functions to some extent as a form of capital in business, yet with its limits therein being increasingly felt, in Tokyo whiteness is a prevalent marker at the workplace, yet barely one that confers benefits.