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In many OECD countries, women are underrepresented in high status, high paying occupations and overrepresented in lower status work. One reason for this inequity is the “motherhood penalty,” where women with children face more roadblocks in hiring and promotions than women without children or men with children. This research focuses on divergent occupational outcomes between men and women with children and analyzes whether parental gender gaps in occupational status are more extreme for immigrant populations. Using data from the Luxembourg Cross-National Data Center, I compare changes in gendered occupational segregation from 2000 to 2016 in Germany and the USA among immigrant and native-born parents. Multinomial logistic regression models and predicted probabilities show that despite instituting policies intended to reduce parental gender inequality in the workforce, Germany fares worse than the USA in gendered occupational outcomes overall. While the gap between mothers’ and fathers’ probabilities of employment in high status jobs is shrinking over time in Germany, particularly for immigrant mothers, Germany’s gender gaps in professional occupations are consistently larger than gaps in the US. Likewise, gender gaps in elementary/labor work participation are also larger in Germany, with immigrant mothers having a much higher likelihood of working in labor/elementary occupations than any other group—including US immigrant women. These findings suggest that work-family policies—at least those implemented in Germany—are not cure-all solutions for entrenched gender inequality. Results also demonstrate the importance of considering the interaction between gender and other demographic characteristics—like immigrant status—when determining the potential effectiveness of proposed work-family policies.
In many OECD countries, women are underrepresented in high status, high paying occupations and overrepresented in lower status work. One reason for this inequity is the “motherhood penalty,” where women with children face more roadblocks in hiring and promotions than women without children or men with children. This research focuses on divergent occupational outcomes between men and women with children and analyzes whether parental gender gaps in occupational status are more extreme for immigrant populations. Using data from the Luxembourg Cross-National Data Center, I compare changes in gendered occupational segregation from 2000 to 2016 in Germany and the USA among immigrant and native-born parents. Multinomial logistic regression models and predicted probabilities show that despite instituting policies intended to reduce parental gender inequality in the workforce, Germany fares worse than the USA in gendered occupational outcomes overall. While the gap between mothers’ and fathers’ probabilities of employment in high status jobs is shrinking over time in Germany, particularly for immigrant mothers, Germany’s gender gaps in professional occupations are consistently larger than gaps in the US. Likewise, gender gaps in elementary/labor work participation are also larger in Germany, with immigrant mothers having a much higher likelihood of working in labor/elementary occupations than any other group—including US immigrant women. These findings suggest that work-family policies—at least those implemented in Germany—are not cure-all solutions for entrenched gender inequality. Results also demonstrate the importance of considering the interaction between gender and other demographic characteristics—like immigrant status—when determining the potential effectiveness of proposed work-family policies.
Crisis-induced refugee migration raises questions of fair responsibility-sharing among political territories. This is relevant for nation states and for subnational territories alike. Theories addressing this problem have mainly been developed with regard to international responsibility-sharing. They assume collective action problems when it comes to organising intergovernmental transfer schemes, something which cannot be easily overcome. It is not well understood how effective transfer schemes can be institutionalised when no hierarchical decision-making is in place. Complementary to that perspective, this paper builds upon constructivist institutional theories that suggest paying more attention to guiding ideas, which can be called upon when intergovernmental transfer schemes are at stake, and to criteria of rationality that can legitimately claim to embody this idea. Legitimate criteria of rationality are typically the result of “investments in form”, i.e. social practices which imbue material objects with certain qualities so that they stand for particular guiding ideas. The article tests this assumption empirically by tracing the institutionalisation process of the Königstein key (Königsteiner Schlüssel) as a dynamic formula for determining state quotas in Germany's refugee federalism. While important precedents of physical intergovernmental responsibility-sharing in refugee matters had already existed in West Germany, their translation to the territorial dispersal of non-German asylum seekers was highly controversial in the 1970s. In this case, resorting to the Königstein key proved to be feasible in part because, by then, the formula had already become a symbol of the idea of federal justice through its use in a variety of different and far less controversial policy fields. However, during the recent wave of refugee immigration it has increasingly become the object of critique.
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