The Work Trajectories of Married Canadian Immigrant Women, 2006–2019

The behaviour of married immigrant women regarding fertility and labour markets is an essential piece to understand the economic and cultural integration of immigrant households. However, the contribution of married immigrant women to the Canadian labour market was—until recently—considered of secondary importance and their labour market choices studied within an economic framework of temporary attachment to the labour force. Recent research, however, finds that a significant fraction of married immigrant women make labour supply decisions (and face barriers) similar to those of native-born married women. We show that this is the case in Canada as well, by estimating the progress of immigrant women over the 2000s. We use traditional measures of labour market outcomes, such as participation, employment and wages, but also novel estimates of labour market dynamics, such as transitions across labour market states to show the work trajectories of married Canadian immigrant women. Results show that immigrant women are less likely to transition into employment—more likely to transition out of employment to either unemployment or inactivity—and more likely to respond to income shocks than the Canadian born. There is evidence of a gradual convergence with years spent in Canada to the outcomes of the Canadian born, which is much slower for immigrant women than immigrant men.

1. In Canada, around 46% of permanent residents (PR) are spouses or dependents. The OECD average share of family migration in 2015 is 40%. (OECD 2017; Facts and Figures 2016, https://www.cic.gc.ca/opendata-onneesouvertes/data/Facts_and_Figures_2016_PR_EN.pdf)

2. Spouses of principal applicants are more likely to be employed than spouses arriving through family reunification. These differences can be traced back to differences in education and other individual characteristics (up to 40% of the difference) and differences in terms of the presence of young children or school attendance (about a third) (Bonikowska and Hou, 2017).

3. Half the differences in participation between Canadian-born and immigrant wives can be accounted for by socioeconomic characteristics, with gender participation ratios in the country of origin and current family size being key elements in accounting for said difference (Morissette and Galarneau, 2016).

4. We note that using a LPM to estimate the probability of becoming a manager reveals that immigrant men are around 1.5% less likely - and immigrant women 7% less likely – to become managers 20 years after arrival than their Canadian-born counterparts. In future work we will address the occupational progress of immigrant women to Canada as an additional dimension along which measure their economic and labour market integration.

5. Other groups that would benefit from looking into these movements are youth, senior citizens, single mothers and individuals with disabilities

6. Pooling all cross-sectional data together potentially introduces bias in the estimates. While clustering techniques could be employed to correcst for it, we adopted the cleaner strategy of selecting one of the interview months for the analysis (and checked the robustness of our estimates to alternative choice of months).

7. The LFS does not provide information about the length of the marriage or the immigration status of the partner at arrival.

8. It is important to remove from labour outcomes confounding effects that have to do with the extent of economic activity, since understandably, one would expect less employment during economic downturns regardless of gender or immigrant status. The standard measure of the business cycle is the prime-age male unemployment rate, which isolates the effect of mainstream economic activity, leaving the female coefficient to pick up any gender related differences that remain

9. Despite the obvious limitations of the LPM, it provides easily interpretable results, which are generally reasonable as long as the average probability of employment/unemployment is sufficiently away from 0 or 1, which is the case here.

10. Although not shown here, estimates of the entry effects on Employment are decreasing—and estimates of entry effects on Unemployment increasing—for successive cohorts, suggesting that recent arrivals cohorts are less likely to be employed—more likely to be unemployed—than earlier cohorts.

11. For the UK, a study by Dustman and Fabri (2005) point out significant wage disparities, particularly between immigrant women of colour and their British-born white counterparts.

12. Married immigrant women also earn substantially less than their spouses, particularly if arriving in the family class (Bonikowska and Hou, 2017).

13. Note that assimilation profiles of men and women immigrants are not directly comparable as they are relative to different reference groups.

14. Estimates adding cohort effects are slightly smaller and less precisely estimated and are available upon request.

15. We looked briefly into a sample of educated women and found that they generally show larger initial gaps in employment and wages, but faster assimilation rates, relative to the Canadian-born (as in Adsera and Ferrer 2016). Similar results hold for transition rates, with slightly larger gaps in flows to Employment (from non-employment) and in flows from Unemployment to Inactivity that closed faster—and completely in the long term. We have not released those estimates, focusing instead on the average immigrant, because there was little additional information to be gained and the risk these estimates posed to confidentiality given the small sample size.

16. Blau (2015) makes the nuanced distinction between social capital and culture and shows that women’s assimilation seems to be driven by the later rather than the former. This suggests a role for changing preferences with time in the country.

The analysis in this paper was conducted at the South Western Ontario Research Data Centre, using administrative data made available by Statistics Canada through the CRDCN. The views expressed in the paper do not necessarily reflect those of the CRDCN, WAGE or Statistics Canada.

We received support for this project from the Department of Women and Gender Equality Canada (WAGE) in cooperation with the Canadian Research Data Centre Network (CRDCN).

Authors and Affiliations

1. Department of Economics, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

   Ana Ferrer

2. IZA Institute for Labour Economics, Bonn, Germany

   Ana Ferrer

3. Centre for Industrial Relations & Human Resources, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

   Yazhuo (Annie) Pan

4. Department of Economics, University of Wilfrid Laurier, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

   Tammy Schirle

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Ana Ferrer.

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