Origin-Country Culture,Migration Sequencing,and Female Employment: Variations among Immigrant Women in the United States

Abstract

Recent studies suggest that the employment rates of foreign-born women are related to cultural norms regarding gender and work in their origin countries. However, origin-country culture may have less influence on the labor-supply decisions of women who self-select into migration precisely in order to pursue work abroad. Female migrants self-select on the basis of employment opportunities to varying extents, and it is hard to measure which ones do and which do not. We propose “migration sequencing” (the timing of married partners’ respective migrations) as a proxy for female migrant selectivity with respect to gender-role beliefs and work incentives: female lead migrants and individual (unmarried) migrants are, on average, more motivated by labor-market opportunities or human-capital formation than concurrent or follower migrants. Using data from the American Community Survey, we analyze employment rates of female immigrants to the United States from 130 countries. Our results confirm that sending-country cultural legacies have smaller effects for lead and unmarried migrants and the largest effect for follower migrants. Consistent with our theoretical reasoning, lead and unmarried migrants apparently self-select on economic motivations or less traditional gender norms more than do follower migrants, whose employment rates are thus more influenced by origin-country culture. The findings yield a more nuanced understanding of the variable role origin-country culture plays in immigrants’ structural incorporation in the United States and potentially in other destinations as well.