Condizione occupazionale e dinamiche familiari delle donne immigrate in Italia

Many studies assume all women to be tied movers and on the basis of this assumption often choose to drop all female migrants from the analysis. Even when this decision might have some reasons, geographical movements may have a strong impact on female participation in the labour market. The aim of this work is to analyse the employment condition of immigrant women in Italy. The research questions are: a) if migrant and natives women were identical in their basic characteristics, would the employment opportunities of the former still be worse than those of the latter? b) does this difference change on the basis of family migration dynamics? We use the EU-LFS data set to estimate a set of linear probability models, analysing both job quality and the employment decision. We found that there is a strong penalization in terms of probability of being employed only for tied-movers immigrant women. However, when we analyze whether the quality of job is good, we observe a strong difference between native and migrant women, independently from their family migration dynamics. Also the husband’s occupational position matter. The employment penalty of migrant women is lower when the husband does not work or is in low-quality jobs. Nevertheless, also in this case, migrant women are still penalized in terms of probabilities of getting a good job, whichever the work condition of the husband or partner.