Canada's racialized immigrant women

Ana Ferrer and Sumeet Singh Dhatt
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Sumeet Singh Dhatt: Department of Economics, University of Waterloo

No 24003, Working Papers from University of Waterloo, Department of Economics

Abstract: Immigrants have traditionally lagged behind labour outcomes of Canadian born workers, a fact that is more obvious for immigrant women and for recent arrivals (those entering Canada within the last five years). In this report we explore the barriers and challenges faced by racialized newcomer women in the Canadian labour market and how differences in their characteristics are (or aren’t) related to differences in labour market outcomes. We use a specially designed survey to capture the experiences of a sample of racialized newcomer women regarding integration into the labour market and what resources and strategies have been most helpful in achieving career success and improving their quality of life. We follow with an in-depth analysis of the labour market environment of immigrant women to Canada using data from the Labour Force Survey and the O*Net data base. This allows us to quantify to what extent immigrant women may be facing barriers and challenges in the labour market, not only along many standard measures of job quality, such as employment, pay, or type of contract, but also examining other non-standard measures of job quality that are informative of the resilience of the jobs immigrants hold, such as the tasks they perform in their jobs. We find that significant initial gaps between newcomer and Canadian-born women exist in employment, wages, schedules and tasks. Newcomer women work less hours, are less likely to work full time or have permanent contracts and earn substantially less than their Canadian-born counterparts. They are also less likely to work jobs requiring non-routine cognitive tasks, which are typically associated with quality jobs. However, they also experience significant improvements along all job aspects. For instance, initial wage gaps to between 63% and 68% of their original size over a span of twenty years. This progress is slightly faster for university educated women. More importantly, gaps in non-routine job tasks also diminish substantially over time, at least by 50% if not more. While it is difficult to evaluate whether a given type of job task signals a job as “good“, the general consensus is that nonroutine tasks will be harder to replace by technology, making those tasks – and the jobs that require them - safer (Frank et al., 2021). Additional analysis also shows that these improvements are far from being homogenous among immigrant women, with significant additional gaps for immigrants more likely to be racialized, particularly those from East and South-east Asia. On this note, we highlight the substantial heterogeneity of experiences regarding the labour market integration of racialized immigrant women, and immigrant women more generally. Education plays a major part in these differences, but also family situation and the ability to validate foreign experience and credentials during the job search

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