Female Employment after Migration (FEM): A Dynamic Approach to Women’s Work and Family Patterns after Migration
Abstract
A large body of literature has amassed that investigates the conditions and processes of the labour market integration of migrants. In this context, female migrants have often been viewed as “tied movers” whose migration decision is subordinate to the behaviour of the male breadwinner. How these gendered migration patterns influence the life course of female migrants, however, has often been left unexplored. This project seeks to fill parts of this research gap by adopting a life course approach to examine how female migrants’ employment decisions intersect with the fertility and partnership domain of the life course. Data for this analysis will come from the IAB-Migrant and the Refugee Samples of the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP), the micro census and the Integrated Employment Biographies Sample (IEBS). Our analytical sample will include the most recent female migrants who have come to Germany in the years 1990–2015. Our project fills a research gap in the following ways: Firstly, we provide novel evidence on recent migrants’ behaviour based on rich longitudinal data that has become available for Germany. Secondly, we bridge the rather unrelated strands of literature that examine the employment and family behaviour of migrants. Thirdly, we investigate how employment intersects with other domains of the life course, in particular how the conditions at migration span forward in time and influence migrants’ family, employment and poverty dynamics.
Principal investigators
Financer
DFG Individual Research Grant
Duration of project
Start date: 02/2019
End date: 03/2022
