Immigrant Women and the COVID-19 Pandemic: An Intersectional Analysis of Frontline Occupational Crowding in the United States

Sarah Small, Yana Rodgers () and Teresa Perry

Forum for Social Economics, 2024, vol. 53, issue 3, 281-306

Abstract: This paper examines changes in occupational crowding of immigrant women in frontline industries in the United States during the onset of COVID-19, and we contextualize their experiences against the backdrop of broader race-based and gender-based occupational crowding. Building on the occupational crowding hypothesis, which suggests that marginalized workers are crowded in a small number of occupations to prop up wages of socially-privileged workers, we hypothesize that immigrant, Black, and Hispanic workers were shunted into frontline work to prop up the health of others during the pandemic. Our analysis of American Community Survey microdata indicates that immigrant workers, particularly immigrant women, were increasingly crowded in frontline work during the onset of the pandemic. We also find that US-born Black and Hispanic workers disproportionately faced COVID-19 exposure in their work, but were not increasingly crowded into frontline occupations following the onset of the pandemic. The paper also provides a rationale for considering the occupational crowding hypothesis along the dimensions of both wages and occupational health.

Date: 2024
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/07360932.2023.2170442 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:fosoec:v:53:y:2024:i:3:p:281-306

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/RFSE20

DOI: 10.1080/07360932.2023.2170442

Access Statistics for this article

Forum for Social Economics is currently edited by William Milberg, Dr Wolfram Elsner, Philip O'Hara, Cecilia Winters and Paolo Ramazzotti

More articles in Forum for Social Economics from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().