The Changing Face of World Cities: Young Adult Children of Immigrants in Europe and the United States

Chapter 6. Immigrants' Daughters and the Labor Market

129 Chapter 6 Immigrants’ Daughters and the Labor Market Thomas Soehl, Rosita Fibbi, and Constanza Vera-Larrucea The previous chapter gave a broad analysis of labor market outcomes for the second generation. This one looks specifically at how the daughters of immigrants fare in the labor markets of different countries. Building on feminist critiques of the welfare state literature, we argue that welfare state arrangements play a critical role in whether and how these young women transition into the workforce. Although welfare state characteristics shape the labor force participation of women regardless of nativity or heritage, they have amplified effects for young women from immigrant families. A major theme in the earlier chapters of this volume has been how institutional arrangements like those governing education and the transition from school to work are critical to the life chances of the second generation . For example, as chapter 2 shows, the ways in which particular systems sort and track pupils have a large influence on second-generation educational achievement (see also Kasinitz et al. 2008; Crul and Schneider 2009). This chapter follows that approach by looking at the gender dimension of policies and practices that shape the second-generation transition into labor market participation and family formation. This approach can be fruitfully subsumed under the term welfare state regimes. 130    The Changing Face of World Cities A substantial literature has developed on how welfare states affect employment dynamics. Much less attention has been given to how different welfare state regimes affect population subgroups (Bambra 2007). Firstgeneration outcomes have received some attention (Kogan 2006), but those of the second generation have until now received much less. This chapter contributes to filling this gap. We do this by analyzing the position of second -generation women in Germany, Switzerland, Sweden, and the United States. We thus follow the lead of feminist critics of the welfare state literature who point out that ways of providing welfare and ways welfare states shape labor markets both have substantial implications for gender relations and roles in many domains (O’Connor 1996; Sundström 1999). Welfare States, Labor Markets, and Gender Equality The movement of women into the labor force is one of the most profound social changes of the twentieth century. Over recent decades, women in all advanced industrial economies have moved into the labor force, though their participation levels vary significantly across countries, from about 60 percent in Italy to almost 90 percent in Sweden. Entry into the labor market and diminished economic dependence on men are important elements in the empowerment of women. Feminist researchers have focused their analysis of welfare regimes on the extent to which they promote women’s personal and public independence: they argue that we must supplement the traditional emphasis on decommodification with a concern for personal autonomy or insulation from dependence (O’Connor 1993). Women’s right to economic, personal, and social autonomy is central in feminist debates of the welfare state. Eva Sundström defines gender regimes as “the ways in which political and institutional solutions affect and are affected by men’s and women’s actual possibilities to choose between paid and unpaid work, along with the ways in which both kinds of work are open up for entrance to social rights” (1999, 194). Recent research provides empirical support for this view. According to Becky Pettit’s and Jennifer Hook’s (2005) analysis of the effect of having a child on female labor force participation across nineteen countries, social policies do substantially affect the overall labor force participation of women, as does the trade-off they face between family and work. For example, generous public provision of child care always increases female employment. Parental leave has more ambiguous results, with short parental leave provisions in Switzerland having positive effects but long ones in Germany tending to separate women from the labor force. Immigrants’ Daughters and the Labor Market    131 More generally, the question of how institutional arrangements and economic structures shape different outcomes is an important topic in welfare state analysis. Gøsta Esping-Andersen (1990) developed a typology to address this issue. He links the characteristics of welfare states to their performance in creating jobs, promoting certain economic sectors over others, and encouraging female labor force participation. He identifies three main welfare regimes: socialist, conservative, and liberal. Liberal and social democratic regimes are friendlier toward female labor force participation, and conservative models are biased against it. Esping...