What jobs do immigrant women do? Almost one fourth of immigrant women in Europe (24%, 25% in EU14 countries) are employed in “elementary occupations”, i.e., occupations that require a low level of skills and competences as they consist of simple and routine tasks, which often demand some physical effort and the use of hand-held tools. For instance, elementary occupations include car washing, mail delivery or package sorting, as well as assisting in the preparation of food and beverages. By way of comparison, 14% of immigrant men have an elementary job, which contrasts with respectively 8% and 6% among employed native women and men (Figure 27).
Specifically, the most frequent occupation of immigrant women in Europe is “domestic, hotel and office cleaners and helpers”: close to one in five (18%) are employed in such jobs. The following five most common occupations, which jointly employ an additional 22% of immigrant women, require an intermediate level of competences. In the top ten most frequent occupations of immigrant women, only two are classified as high-skill, and they are the eighth and the ninth in the list: administrative and specialised secretaries, and nursing and midwifery associate professionals, which employ 1.8% of immigrant women each. Among the top occupations of immigrant men, jobs which require an intermediate level of competences are slightly more frequent, and the only occupation requiring a high level of skill is the third most common: software and applications developers and analysts.
Figure 1: One every four employed immigrant women is an elementary worker
Share of elementary workers, cleaners and domestic helpers and care workers over respective employed population (2020)
Immigrant women are more than four times as likely as native women to work as hotel, office or domestic cleaners and helpers (18% vs 4%): this is by far the most frequent occupation for native women, and it accounts for almost three quarters of the “elementary jobs” of immigrant women. Personal care jobs are also very frequent among immigrant women: across Europe 10% of them are “personal care workers in health services”, such as home-based personal care workers or health assistants, and “child care workers and teachers’ aides”, twice the corresponding share among native women.
Immigrant women are especially concentrated in elementary jobs in Southern European countries: about one third of immigrant women in Italy, Greece and Spain are employed in an elementary occupation. In these countries, almost one in four employed immigrant women holds a cleaning or domestic job. Conversely, the clustering in elementary jobs is lowest in Slovakia (4%) and Norway (9%).
Figure 2: 40% of employed African women work in an elementary job
Immigrant – native gap in employment probability in elementary jobs, by gender and origin (2020)
The higher concentration of immigrant women (and men) in elementary occupations is not driven by one specific area of origin, although there are significant differences in the likelihood of having a low-pay job between immigrants from different home countries. African women (and men) are by far the most commonly employed in elementary occupations (with a differential relative to natives of 40 p.p. among women and 22 p.p. among men), while immigrant women from EU countries have the lowest differentials in the probability of working in an elementary occupation (13 p.p. women, 4 p.p. men).
Figure 3: Even after 30 years in the country, immigrant women are the most likely to be employed in an elementary occupation
Immigrant-native differences in employment probability in elementary jobs, by gender and years since migration (2020)
The higher concentration of immigrant women (and, although to a lesser extent of immigrant men) in elementary occupations is not just a characteristic of recent migrants, which vanishes after a few years since migration when language skills and other dimensions of country-specific human capital improve. Immigrant women who have been in the host country for up to six years are about 15 percentage points more likely to have an elementary job relative to native women (Figure 3). The gap then decreases over time, but at a very slow pace: for women with ten years of residence the differential is still 17 percentage points, and it reaches about 6 percentage points after 35-39 years since migration. The immigrant-native difference in the probability of having an elementary job among men is lower and, remarkably, there is no major evolution of the differential over years since migration.
The evolution over years since migration of the difference in the probability of employment in an elementary occupation between immigrants and natives in Italy follows a similar trajectory, but there are at least two distinctive features. First, the initial immigrant-native differential in probability of employment in an elementary occupation is substantially higher than the European average, with an immigrant-native gap of more than 40 percentage points among women. Second, the differential among men is very similar to the differential among women, both in its initial level and in its evolution over time.
Figure 30: Immigrant women more likely to work as cleaners, regardless of their years of residence in the host country
Immigrant-native differences in employment probability in cleaning and personal care jobs, by gender and years since migration (2020)
Immigrant women are on average 13.6 p.p. more likely than native women to be employed in a cleaning job, and 4.2 p.p. more likely to hold a personal care job. The corresponding gaps are significantly lower among men (1.8 and 0.4 p.p. respectively). However, while the higher concentration of immigrant women in cleaning jobs starts soon after their arrival in the host country and remains relatively stable around 15 p.p. over their first 30 years of residence, it is not until the fourth year since migration that immigrant women become 5 p.p. more likely than native women to have a personal care job. Since care jobs require a higher level of trust and personal interaction than cleaning and domestic jobs, it takes immigrant women some year before they develop the necessary linguistic skills and network to specialise in these occupations, which they then tend to leave after twenty to thirty years in the host country.
Figure 31: Among elementary workers, women are three times more likely than men to be at the bottom of the income distribution
Immigrant and native distribution along national income deciles, by gender and occupation (2020)
Almost half of all elementary workers fall in the three bottom deciles of the national income distribution. However, not only are immigrant – and native – women more likely to be employed in an elementary occupation than men, but they are also more likely to receive a lower wage, even within the same occupation. Among elementary workers as a whole, but also among cleaners and domestic helpers specifically, women are clustered in the bottom income deciles, much more so than men. Among those employed in an elementary job, 41% of immigrant women and 37% of native women have wages that place them in the first decile of the national income distribution, while the corresponding shares are much lower for both immigrant (13%) and native (15%) men.
Cleaners and helpers are a particularly low-pay job, even among the generally low pay elementary occupations, and one with a very high concentration of (immigrant) women. However, the higher proportion of women in cleaning occupations is not the reason why women are so much more likely than men in elementary occupations to be in the bottom decile of the income distribution. In fact, almost half (46%) of immigrant women employed as cleaners and domestic helpers are in the bottom income decile, which compares to 42% among native women, and to only 20% among immigrant and native men. Thus, women are paid less than men even within the same type of elementary – and low pay – occupation. The distribution of care workers along income deciles is more similar between men and women, even though women are still more frequently in the bottom two deciles.
