Immigrant Women’s Economic Outcomes in Europe: The Importance of Religion and Traditional Gender Roles

Abstract

This article contributes to previous research on immigrant integration by examining how religiosity and gender roles in European countries influence immigrant women’s labor market outcomes. Moreover, we extend theoretical work on the importance of the receiving country’s norms and values by hypothesizing and testing whether receiving countries’ influence varies with immigrant women’s religiosity and gender-role attitudes. Using the European Social Survey data and multilevel regression models, we find that religious immigrant women participate less in the labor market and work fewer hours than nonreligious immigrant women. Immigrant women’s traditional gender-role attitudes partly explain the negative relationship between individual religiosity and labor market outcomes. While the receiving country’s religiosity is negatively related to immigrant women’s labor market outcomes, this negative relationship is significantly weaker for religious and gender-traditional immigrant women than for nonreligious and gender-egalitarian women. These findings suggest that the economic benefits of residing in countries that support female employment are limited to immigrant women who are ready and positioned to embrace gender-egalitarian norms and values.

What does sociological research tell us about ethnic inequalities in European labour markets?

“…Another GEMM study looked at the role of belonging to a Muslim minority group, finding evidence in different countries for increasing discrimination when originating from a majority Muslim country ('Muslim by default' effect) and when signalling one's personal Muslim affiliation ('disclosed Muslim' effect) (Di Stasio et al, 2021). These experimental findings are in line with results from surveys, which show that Muslim minority groups are less well incorporated in the labour markets of Western Europe than other minority groups, even after taking into account observed and unobserved human capital (Van Tubergen, Maas and Flap, 2004;Van Tubergen, 2006;Kanas and Müller, 2021).…”

Religious trajectories of immigrants in the first years after migration

“…In the Netherlands, as in many other Western European countries, a steadily growing migrant population from highly religious origin countries encounters an increasingly nonreligious native majority (Norris and Inglehart 2012; Voas 2008; Voas and Fleischmann 2012). Due to the differences in religiosity between immigrants and natives, there has been an increase in scholarly interest in the relation between religion and various integration outcomes, such as educational achievement (Carol and Schulz 2018), labor market behavior (Kanas and Müller 2021; Khoudja and Fleischmann 2015), social contacts (Maliepaard and Schacht 2018; Steinmann 2020), and cultural attitudes (Röder 2014). But in contrast to the United States, where religion is traditionally viewed as a stepping stone into mainstream society, Europeans often perceive religion as a barrier to immigrants’ integration (Foner and Alba 2008).…”

At the intersection of adverse life course pathways: the effects on health by nativity

“…One explanation for this pattern is that immigrant women are in a particularly disadvantaged position relative to that of both immigrant men and native women (Donato et al 2014). It is, for example, known that immigrant women are, on average, poorer, overrepresented in the informal job market (Donato et al 2014;De Jong and Madamba 2001), less educated, and more subject to the detrimental effects of traditional gender roles and social norms (Kanas and Müller 2021;Khoudja and Fleischmann 2017). Being more exposed to the detrimental effects of traditional gender roles may imply, for instance, that immigrant women are more likely than men or native women to face challenges in balancing family care (children and parents) with work.…”