Gender Norms, Labor Supply, and Fertility across Immigrant Generations

Background/Purpose: Recent immigration to the United States and other developed nations has increasingly been from countries that have relatively traditional gender norms. Previous research has documented that sending country gender norms influence the market labor supply and fertility of immigrant women. There is however no research on how the impact of sending country gender norms transcends across immigrant generations. If the impact of sending country norms is sustained across generations that would suggest that sending country gender norms have a firmer grip on immigrants than is generally believed to be the case, which would inform social work practice with immigrants as well as services and policies for promoting the wellbeing of immigrant women and families. We study whether the influence of sending country gender norms on women’s employment and fertility changes after immigration to the U.S.

Methods: We use data from the Current Population Survey for 2000–2014 and restrict our analyses to women aged 18–64 in four immigrant generations that we define as follows: foreign-born women who arrived after age 15 are the 1^st generation, those who arrived at age 15 or younger are the 1.5^th generation, U.S.-born women with both foreign-born parents are the 2^nd generation, and U.S.-born women with one foreign-born parent and one U.S.-born parent are the 2.5^th generation. We supplement these data with a panel dataset of sending country characteristics for 1950–2010 from the World Bank. We use multivariate regression analyses to separately study two dependent variables: number of hours worked per week and total number of births. The key independent variables in the analyses are the ratio of female-to-male labor force participation and total fertility rate in the sending country at the period of immigration. We control for demographic and sending country characteristics in our analyses.

Results: Immigrants’ and descendants’ labor supply is positively associated with the female-male participation ratio in the sending country, but the effect size declines substantially across generations. Female-male participation ratio in sending countries is also associated with the fertility of immigrant women, but the association is largely confined to the 1^st generation and turns statistically insignificant for higher generations. The total fertility rate in the sending country is associated with fertility of immigrant women; however, the relationship dissipates across generations. 

Conclusions and Implications: There is a steady decline in the influence of gender norms in sending countries on immigrant women across generations along the labor supply and fertility dimensions. These dimensions are closely linked to family welfare and economic independence of women, which suggests adoption of western gender norms and improvements in the wellbeing of immigrant women across generations.