Saturday, March 15, 2014
Hampton (Omni Shoreham)
High employment rates are key to keeping generous European welfare states demographically sustainable. Given the rapid aging of populations with low fertility rates, the employment of new groups, especially immigrants and working-aged women who have been outside the paid labour force, will be central to this sustainability. However, scholars of immigrant incorporation express concern over persistently low employment rates among immigrants, and they note that for numerous reasons, including human capital levels and cultural expectations about gender roles specific to immigrants' home countries, many groups of immigrant women work at particularly low rates. This paper examines the hypothesis that 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. Using harmonised EU Labour Force Surveys over a 13-year time span (1992-2005), I examine the employment rates of immigrants and native-born workers by gender. Preliminary findings suggest that there is only weak correspondence between the employment rates of immigrant men and native-born men, whereas for women, especially married women with children, the same forces shaping native-born women's employment rates strongly shape immigrant women's employment rates as well. I then examine the plausibility of various institutional explanations -- both immigrant-specific integration policies and more general features of labor market and welfare state institutions -- for these patterns. Work/family policies, which vary considerably across European countries, prove to be among the most important.
