This essay sketches out the post-feminist narrative employed by the radical-right populist party Alternative für Deutschland in the German national parliament between October 2017 and July 2018. Striving to establish a hegemonic ontology, the Alternative für Deutschland conjures up a social imaginary of a German heartland, where equal rights between ‘naturally’ different women and men have long been achieved – a heartland that has to be protected from ‘Muslim culture’ as much as from the ‘leveling down’ imposed by a ‘radical feminist elite’. Between these frames, the Alternative für Deutschland presents itself as the only true champion of women and, while never asserting to be feminist, implicitly lays claim to a particular and exclusivist post-feminist position. I argue that the Alternative für Deutschland’s capabilities to promote this populist narrative have become further enhanced by its election to the national parliament, presenting a serious challenge and also a chance for German feminism to self-critically engage with issues of intersectionality and representation in public discourse.

Objective: This paper draws on data from the Microcensus to provide a long-term overview of the labor market performance of different arrival cohorts of female and male migrants to Germany. Background: Whereas there is a large body of research on the labor market outcomes of migrants to Germany, a more descriptive long-term and gender-specific overview is missing. Method: We provide descriptive analyses for the employment rates, working hours, and occupational status levels of different arrival cohorts by gender, calendar year, and duration of stay. The data cover the time period 1976-2015.   Results: With the exception of the earliest cohort, migrant women and men have been consistently less likely to be employed than their German counterparts. While the average working hours of migrant women of earlier cohorts were longer than those of German women, the average working hours of migrant women declined considerably across subsequent cohorts. The occupational status levels of female and male migrants have increased across arrival cohorts, corresponding to increasing levels of education. Analyses by duration of stay indicate that the occupational status of arrival cohorts have tended to decline during their initial years of residence and then to stagnate thereafter, which may be due in part to selective outmigration and the naturalization of migrants with higher skill levels. Conclusion: Our results clearly show that the labor market performance of immigrants has varied greatly by arrival cohort, reflecting the conditions and policy contexts during which they entered Germany. This conclusion applies to both genders, but especially to women.

We exploit the natural experiment of German reunification in 1990 to investigate if the institutional regimes of the formerly socialist (rather gender-equal) East Germany and the capitalist (rather gender-traditional) West Germany resulted in differing gender norms regarding who should be the family breadwinner. We use data for three periods between 1983 and 2016 from the German Socio-Economic Panel. Density discontinuity tests and fixed-effects regressions suggest that married couples in West (but not East) Germany diminished the wife’s labor market outcomes in order to avoid situations where she would earn more than him. However, the significance of the male breadwinner norm seems to decline in West Germany since reunification, converging to the more gender egalitarian East Germany. Our work provides evidence that political and institutional frameworks can shape fairly persistent gender identity norms that influence household economic decisions for some time, even when these frameworks change.

We exploit the natural experiment of German reunification in 1990 to investigate if the institutional regimes of the formerly socialist (rather gender-equal) East Germany and the capitalist (rather gender-traditional) West Germany shaped different gender identity prescriptions of family breadwinning. We use data for three periods between 1984 and 2016 from the representative German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP). Density discontinuity tests and fixed-effects regressions suggest that married couples in West (but not East) Germany diminished the wife's labor market outcomes in order to avoid situations where she would earn more than him. However, the significance of the male breadwinner prescription seems to decline in West Germany since reunification, converging to the more gender-egalitarian East Germany. Our work emphasizes the view that political and institutional frameworks can shape fairly persistent gender identity prescriptions that influence household economic decisions for some time, even when these frameworks change.

We investigate intersecting wage gaps by gender and nativity by comparing the wages between immigrant women, immigrant men, native women, and native men based on Western German survey data. Adding to the analytical diversity of the field, we do a full comparison of group wages to emphasize the relationality of privilege and disadvantage, and we use a nonparametric matching decomposition that is well suited to address unique group-specific experiences. We find that wage (dis)advantages associated with the dimensions of gender and nativity are nonadditive and result in distinct decomposition patterns for each pairwise comparison. After accounting for substantial group differences in work attachment, individual resources, and occupational segregation, unexplained wage gaps are generally small for comparisons between immigrant women, immigrant men, and native women, but large when either group is compared to native men. This finding suggests that the often presumed “double disadvantage” of immigrant women is rather a “double advantage” of native men.