Gender and Ethnicity-Married immigrants in Britain

In this paper we investigate the economic activity of married or cohabiting female immigrants in Britain. We distinguish between two immigrant groups: foreign born females who belong to an ethnic minority group and their husbands, and foreign born white females and their husbands. We compare these to native born white women and their husbands. Our analysis deviates from the usual mean analysis and investigates employment, hours worked and earnings for males and females, as well as their combined family earnings, along the distribution of husbands’ economic potential. We analyse the extent to which economic disadvantage may be reinforced at the household level and investigate to what extent it can be explained by differences in observable characteristics. We find that white female immigrants and their husbands have an overall advantage in earnings over white native born, both individually and at the household level. Minority immigrants do less well, in particular at the lower end of the husband’s economic potential distribution. This is mainly due to the low employment of both genders, which leads to a disadvantage in earnings, intensified at the household level. Only part of this differential can be explained by observable characteristics. 1 We thank one anonymous referee, and Theresa Casey, Marco Manacorda and Jonathan Wadsworth for helpful comments. We also thank participants at the annual CesIfo conference on “Employment and Social Protection”, Munich, and the European Society for Population Economics, Paris, for comments. We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Economic and Social Research Council (grant RES-000-23-0332). Fabbri gratefully acknowledges financial support from the Munich Graduate School of Economics/Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. 2 Department of Economics and CReAM (Centre for Research and Analysis of Migration), University College London. 3 Department of Economics, University of Munich and CReAM (Centre for Research and Analysis of Migration), University College London. Gender and Ethnicity 2