It is well known that women have, in general, a lower employment probability than men. In 2020, the employment probability of native men over 24 years old in Europe was 82%, whereas the employment probability of native women in the same age range was 71%. This gender gap in employment is even more substantial among immigrants. The employment probability of immigrant women is 58%: immigrant women are 14 percentage points (or 19%) less likely than native women to have a job. Conversely, the employment probability of immigrant men is 76%, hence the male immigrant-native gap in employment probability is 6 percentage points (7%).
The immigrant-native difference in employment probability is higher for women than for men not only on average, but also in almost all European countries, with the only exception of a few countries with very low immigrant presence (Poland, Slovakia, Latvia, Croatia) and Iceland. We show this in Figure 19, which plots the percentage point difference in employment probability between immigrant and native women against the corresponding difference among men for each country. In most European countries, both male and female immigrants have lower employment probabilities than natives. If the immigrant-native employment gap were the same among men and women, all countries would lie on the 45-degree line. However, since the gap among women is usually larger than among men, most countries fall below such a line. Remarkably, even in most of the countries where immigrant men have a higher employment probability than native men, the immigrant employment gap is still negative for women (Italy, Luxembourg, Portugal, Cyprus, Czech Republic). The country in which immigrant women are most disadvantaged is Romania (28.9 p.p.), followed by Sweden (23.2 p.p.) and Germany (21.9 p.p.).
Overall, individual characteristics explain very little of the immigrant-native employment differentials: comparing immigrants and natives with the same age and education profiles reduces the employment probability gap by only 1 percentage point for women, while it has no effects on the estimated gap among men.
The percentage point difference in the employment probability between immigrant and native women in Italy (7 p.p.) is about half the European average (14 p.p.); a fact which is mainly determined by the extremely low employment rate of Italian women (56.5% vs an EU average of 71%), the second lowest in Europe after Greece (55%). Thus, even though the percentage point gap is small, this does not imply that immigrant women in Italy are more likely to be employed than immigrant women in other European countries; in fact, the employment rate of immigrant women in Italy is also the second lowest in Europe, after Greece (50 vs 44%, respectively). Interestingly, while Italian men also have a lower than EU average employment rate (76 vs 82%), the share of employed immigrant men in Italy is instead slightly higher than the European average (78 vs. 76%, respectively) which implies that the male immigrant-native differential in employment probability in Italy is positive. Unlike in the rest of Europe, however, comparing immigrant women in Italy with native women with similar age and education profiles (“conditional gap”) delivers a somehow different picture: the employment probability gap decreases from -6.9 to -4.1 percentage points, indicating that immigrant women have demographic characteristics that make them less employable than Italian women (Figure 20). Furthermore, the “unconditional” and the “conditional” immigrant-native gaps in female employment probability in Italy have followed two markedly different trends over the past 15 years. In 2005, immigrant women were 2.4 percentage points more likely to have a job than Italian women. However, after 2010 the difference shrank until disappearing in 2015 and reaching -6.9 p.p. in 2020. At the same time, the “conditional” employment gap, i.e., the gap relative to Italian women with similar characteristics, was negative (-3.9 p.p.) in 2005, then steadily decreased until disappearing in 2010 – when there was also no “unconditional” difference – and then bounced back to -4.1 p.p. in 2020. These data indicate that between 2005 and 2010 immigrant women were at an advantage with respect to native women’s employment probability, since they had age and education profiles that made them more employable. However, their relative age-education profiles deteriorated over time until becoming the same as those of Italian women by 2015. In 2020, the “unconditional” gap is more negative than the “conditional” one, indicating that the average characteristics of immigrant women in Italy make them less employable than Italians.
The gender gap in employment probability is larger among immigrants than among natives. At the European level, the native gender gap has been decreasing over time – from 16 p.p. in 2005 to 11 p.p. in 2020 –, whereas among immigrants it has remained substantially unchanged over the past decade, around 18 percentage points (Figure 21). This is true of both the “unconditional” and the “conditional” gaps.
Italy stands out from the rest of Europe as its gender gap in employment is much higher than the European average, both for immigrants and for natives. While between 2005 and 2015 both differentials have decreased substantially (from 34 to 24 percentage points for immigrants, from 28 to 22 for natives), the trend among immigrants has reversed in the past five years, when the gender gap has increased again by about 4 percentage points. Interestingly, the reversal of this trend started before the pandemic crisis, hence it is driven by other factors than simply the recent Covid-induced recession.
Italy is one of the European countries with the highest male-female gaps, mainly because of the exceptionally low employment rates of both immigrant and native women: the raw gender gap is 28 p.p. among immigrants, and 19 p.p. among natives. The only country with a larger gap between male and female immigrants is Romania (40 p.p.), while the largest differentials between native men and women are in Malta (22 p.p.), Greece and Romania (20 p.p.), and Italy (19 p.p.). In most European countries the male-female gap in employment probability is larger among immigrants, with the exception of Hungary, Iceland, Latvia, Poland and Malta (Figure 22).
