Objective: This paper examines gender differences in the labour market integration of newly arrived refugees in Germany. In particular, we focus on the heterogeneity in employment rates among female refugees.
Background: Previous research has demonstrated that refugee women are disadvantaged on the labour market not only compared to their male counterparts, but also compared to other immigrant women. So far, however, little is known about the mechanisms that underlie the specific disadvantages of refugee women.
Method: Using data from the IAB-BAMF-SOEP Survey of Refugees, we analyse the labour market participation of refugees who migrated to Germany between 2013 and 2017. To test our theoretical assumptions, we apply logistic regressions.
Results: Our results show that compositional differences in qualifications, family structure, institutional support, and networks can partly explain the gender gap in labour force participation that disadvantage refugee women. We find substantial variation in the importance of different determinants for the labour market outcomes of men and women.
Conclusion: As the gender gaps in labour supply could be fully attributed to the theoretical mechanisms offered in the literature, further research is needed to disentangle female refugees' employment behaviour.
Concepts such as “belonging” (Yuval‐Davis, 2011) and “community of value” (Anderson, 2013) try to capture the multiple ways of classifying migrants. In this article, we argue that belonging needs to be analyzed against the backdrop of active social citizenship in European welfare states. Although the literature acknowledges the increasing links between migration and social policies, the latest “turn to activation” in social policy has hardly been accounted for. By focusing on two policy fields in Germany, the labor market and health policies, we briefly describe discourses and social right entitlements and their ambivalences. Empirically we show (a) how bureaucrats within the two policy fields regulate and justify refugees’ social rights in practice and (b) how refugees act vis‐à‐vis relevant institutional opportunity structures. Our study contributes to previous research twofold: Firstly, we illustrate processes of positioning and selecting refugees that stem from recent social policy architecture. Secondly, we demonstrate everyday experiences from refugees’ vis‐á‐vis relevant institutional opportunity structures in Germany. Our results show that inconsistencies within and between social policy fields of one welfare state have to be taken into consideration for further national and transnational research.
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