Immigrant Women's Employment and Immigrant Family Poverty: Comparative Evidence From Europe

Contemporary welfare state scholars often assert that high employment rates, in particular female employment, are key to reducing family poverty and to keeping generous welfare states demographically sustainable. Nonetheless, policies that facilitate women's work vary considerably across countries. Scholars of immigrant incorporation express concern that low employment rates among immigrants prevent social integration. They also point out that  many groups of immigrant women work at particularly low rates due to country of origin features such as human capital levels and cultural expectations.  This paper examines the role of immigrant women's employment in shaping immigrant family poverty in cross-nationally comparative context, focusing on both the plausibility and the limits of various explanations by controlling for immigrants' sending countries and comparing identical groups in different receiving contexts. The evidence shows that t host-country institutions -- and not just characteristics specific to immigrants and their cultures of origin -- have an important role to play in shaping immigrant women's employment and immigrant family poverty. The paper draws on numerous data sources,  including the LIS database and several country-specific datasets