Immigrants and Gender Roles: Assimilation vs. Culture

Francine Blau

No 9534, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: This paper examines evidence on the role of assimilation versus source country culture in influencing immigrant women's behavior in the United States – looking both over time with immigrants' residence in the United States and across immigrant generations. It focuses particularly on labor supply but, for the second generation, also examines fertility and education. We find considerable evidence that immigrant source country gender roles influence immigrant and second generation women's behavior in the United States. This conclusion is robust to various efforts to rule out the effect of other unobservables and to distinguish the effect of culture from that of social capital. These results support a growing literature that suggests that culture matters for economic behavior. At the same time, the results suggest considerable evidence of assimilation of immigrants. Immigrant women narrow the labor supply gap with native-born women with time in the United States, and, while our results suggest an important role for intergenerational transmission, they also indicate considerable convergence of immigrants to native levels of schooling, fertility, and labor supply across generations.

Keywords: culture; gender; immigration; labor supply; human capital; wages; social capital (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J13 J16 J22 J24 J61 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 44 pages
Date: 2015-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dem, nep-gro, nep-lab, nep-ltv, nep-mig and nep-soc
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (30)

Published - published in: IZA Journal of Migration, 2015, 4

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Related works:
Journal Article: Immigrants and gender roles: assimilation vs. culture (2015)
Working Paper: Immigrants and Gender Roles: Assimilation vs. Culture (2015)
Working Paper: Immigrants and Gender Roles: Assimilation vs. Culture (2015)
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