Women's Labor Market Participation Across Ethnic Groups: The Role of Household Conditions, Gender Role Attitudes, and Religiosity in Different National Contexts

Women’s labor market participation rates differ substantially between ethnic groups in many Western countries, with ethnic minority women often having lower participation rates than women from the native majority group. This is perceived as problematic due to the negative consequences for these women’s economic independence and upward mobility in the next generation. Earlier research has tried to explain ethnic group differences in female labor market participation with compositional differences between these groups in human capital resources and family conditions, but, typically, unexplained differences remain. This brings up the question which other factors can explain the remaining ethnic differences.
This dissertation addresses this question by examining women’s labor market participation across ethnic groups in the Netherlands, the UK, and Germany using large-scale cross-sectional and longitudinal data. The focus of the analyses lies on the role of cultural norms and values for women’s labor market participation and on the question to what extent common explanations for female labor market participation, developed mostly for native majority women in Western countries, can be used to understand the labor market behavior of ethnic minority women. The empirical chapters address how ethnic differences in women’s labor market participation are shaped by women’s own gender role attitudes and religiosity, their partner’s economic resources and gender role attitudes, and the national context of the host-societies.
The analyses reveal that compositional differences between the ethnic groups in human capital and household conditions, as well as in other demographic control characteristics, explain the largest share of ethnic differences in women’s labor market participation. In addition to these explanations, differences in gender role attitudes contribute a small, yet noticeable, share to the explanation of ethnic differences in women’s labor market participation whereas religiosity appears not to be particularly important. Overall, these different explanations contribute a large share to the ethnic differences in women’s labor market participation, but, ultimately, some unexplained differences still remained. For example, results repeatedly showed higher participation rates for Surinamese and Antillean women than for native Dutch women after taking into account all explanatory factors. Furthermore, male partners’ gender role attitudes matter for women’s decision to participate in the labor market and this seems to be the case across ethnic groups. In contrast, male partners’ labor market resources do not strongly affect women’s labor market participation regardless of both partners’ gender role attitudes. Finally, ethnic difference in women’s labor market participation seem to be more pronounced in the UK than in the Netherlands and Germany – especially women from the main Muslim minority groups seem to have lower participation rates in the UK than in the Netherlands and Germany compared to the respective native majority group.
Overall, the dissertation elucidates how research on women’s labor market participation can benefit from taking into account the increasing ethnic diversity of Western societies. At the same time, this work shows that the literature on immigrant integration should pay more attention to the specific needs and experience of ethnic minority women as they differ from those of ethnic minority men, especially in the realm of family and work.