Between Two Worlds: Source‐Country Gender Roles and Gender Differences in Educational Attainment among Immigrant Children

Abstract

Recent scholarship has focused on the relationship between source‐country characteristics such as female labor force participation, fertility, level of economic development, gender role attitudes, and immigrants’ labor market assimilation. These studies refer to national‐level factors when accounting for the vast differences in home‐country groups in labor market outcomes. This study asks to what extent these source‐country characteristics affect immigrant children's educational outcomes. Using data from the 2006 Canadian Census and World Values Survey, this article examines the extent to which the gender gap in educational attainment among immigrant children is associated with source‐country factors. Female child immigrants who come from countries with high female labor force participation and high levels of GDP have an advantage over their male counterparts in university education. Source‐country gender role ideology played a role in university completion rates for immigrant parents, but not for child immigrants.

Gendered Pathways to Integration: Why Immigrants’ Naming Practices Differ by the Child’s Gender

“…The actual effect of parents' naming choices, however, could be reversed: the integration of sons is hampered by the parents' strategy of boundary maintenance, whereas daughters can improve their position in relation to their male counterparts. This result corresponds with findings from other studies showing that, on average, girls are more successful in the educational system than boys (Qin-Hilliard 2003;Heß-Meining 2004;Qin 2006;Zielonka et al 2013;Abada et al 2018;Qian et al 2018). 17 This finding is often interpreted as the result of a mismatch between the demands of the school and traditional conceptions of masculinity (Salikutluk and Heyne 2017).…”