As we have seen in Part 1, immigrants are more likely than natives to be at the bottom of the income distribution of their host countries. What we did not stress there is that such a concentration in bottom deciles is mainly driven by the low incomes of immigrant women, rather than by men. Overall, women are overrepresented in the bottom decile while the top income decile is dominated by men, but immigrant women are by far the most disadvantaged, with 18% in the bottom income decile, and almost half of them concentrated in the three lowest income deciles (49%).
Native women are more evenly distributed across income deciles, with just a slight over-representation in the bottom part of the distribution (34% of native women are in the bottom three deciles), and a corresponding under-representation at the top (15% in the top two deciles). Instead, only 5% of immigrant and native men are in the bottom income decile, while respectively 13% and 15% of immigrant and native men are in the top income decile (see Figure 23). Such a gendered pattern in income distribution holds in most European countries, it is not driven just by a handful of them, as we show in Figure 24.
The only country in which immigrant women in the top decile reach 10% is Belgium; in the rest of Europe the top decile is dominated by men, both immigrants and natives. Likewise, in only a handful of countries less than 10% of immigrant women are in the bottom income decile (Cyprus (9%), Denmark (7%), Ireland (8%), Lithuania (8%), the Netherlands (4%) and Switzerland (9%)). Instead, in most countries immigrant women in the bottom decile are more than 10%, and in three countries this share is above 20%: Italy (28%), Greece (25%) and France (21%).
Why are immigrant women (and men) so much more likely to be in the bottom income decile than their native counterparts?
Differences in individual characteristics with respect to native women cannot explain such a large gap. We show this in Figure 25, where we decompose the income differential between immigrants and natives into a part due to differences in age and education, a part due to the specific occupations in which they are employed, and a residual part, which cannot be explained by individual or job characteristics. Differences in individual characteristics explain only 7% of the differential for women (but 17% for men), whereas occupational clustering is responsible for about two thirds of the differential for both men (64%) and women (61%). Remarkably, a substantial part of the differential between immigrant and native women, about one third, remains unexplained, while the same is not true for men. Thus, not only are immigrant women disproportionately more likely to work in low pay jobs than native women (as is the case for immigrant men relative to native men), but there is an additional gender-specific immigrant wage penalty that affects native women (but much less so native men), regardless of their occupation, or their demographic characteristics.
