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Female Employment after Migration (FEM): A Dynamic Approach to Women’s Work and Family Patterns after Migration

Subject Area Empirical Social Research
Term from 2018 to 2022
Project identifier Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 403158126
 
Final Report Year 2024

Final Report Abstract

The objective of the project was to understand the employment behaviour of immigrant women in Germany. From the life course perspective, we investigated the following research questions: How quickly do migrant women enter the labour market after migration? How do migration, marriage, childbearing, and employment interrelate in the life courses of migrant women? Which roles do individual resources, labour market opportunities, gender role attitudes and cultural contexts play? The analyses were based on large scale survey data, particularly on data from the micro-census, the IAB-SOEP Migration Survey, the IAB-BAMF-SOEP Refugee Survey and two recent longitudinal surveys of new immigrants to Germany, namely the SCIP- and the ENTRA-data. Methods for longitudinal data, such as sequence analysis and event-history models were employed. We also used rich descriptive methods and drew on decomposition analyses. The investigations showed great variety depending on country of origin, period of arrival, and context of migration. Except for the very early migrant cohorts (women who migrated 1964-73), migrant women’s employment rates were much below that of native women. As native women’s employment rates increased over time and migrant women’s declined or stagnated, gaps between the two groups rather widened. However, strong heterogeneities exist within recent migrant populations. There is little difference between the employment rates of native women and the steadily growing group of female migrants from EU-countries, who can freely migrate for work, study, or other reasons. Women from non-EU countries, however, display comparatively low employment rates. The reasons for the low employment rates of female migrants from non-EU countries are manifold (e.g., the difficulty to transfer educational credentials across countries, lack of work experience and German language proficiency, more traditional gender role attitudes). We emphasized in our project that these aspects cannot be seen in isolation from the migration policies which define the pathways by which migrant women enter the country. Apart from “family reunification”, there have been only very limited pathways for women from non-EU countries to migrate to Europe. Family re-unifiers are typically married, and often have children shortly after migration, which greatly reduces their long-term employment chances. The shortage of labor and the aging of European societies generate an ever-increasing demand for workers throughout the economy which cannot be met by migrants from EU-countries alone. This situation may generate new avenues for work-oriented and skilled female migrants from non-EU-countries to migrate to Germany. This project emphasized that the labor market integration of immigrant women is a complex but highly social policy relevant topic, which has garnered too little attention in Germany in the past. We have advanced this area of research by adopting a life course and intersectional approach, by drawing on a variety of established and new data sources and by employing a wide range of methods which seemed best suited to address the heterogeneities and complexities involved.

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