The Children of Immigrants
As this story shows, something really quite odd is happening with the earnings of the children of immigrants in Canada.
What they’ve found is that earnings for daughters of immigrants are above average while those for the sons of immigrants are below average. This is after controlling for things like levels of education which are known to affect earnings. It’s also not down to language: all were born in Canada and educated there. Nor can it be racial discrimination, because that should affect the sexes equally.
The differences were quite startling. Women with two immigrant parents earned 15% more on average than those born to natives: and for the men there was a 38% decline in earnings.
One thought that I had was that while for the children of immigrants we were looking at just one age cohort, while for the children of natives we were looking at the total population, also turns out not to be true. So my thought that it could be showing a reversal of the gender pay gap, something which would happen in the younger generation, also wasn’t true.
So it’s all a bit of a puzzle. No one knows why this is happening at all. Any ideas as to why it is would be gratefully welcomed, both here and also by Statistics Canada, who are just as much in the dark as I am.
November 7th, 2007 at 10:39 pm
The end of the article cites an immigration expert who seems to explain it well, and it is his opinion of this study that I would adhere to: Minority women’s wages are being compared to non-minority women; minority men’s wages are being compared to non-minority men. Non-minority men are making more money than anyone else, including non-minority women. There’s more room for women to move up than men, especially with the minority women’s choice to have fewer children or no children as young women. If minority women, opposed to non-minority women, decide to do whatever they can to move up in jobs, salary, etc, the decision to delay having, or not have, babies will put them ahead of women who are having babies. The study noted that daughters of immigrants are having fewer babies than daughters of Canadian born.
Men do not have this wiggle room. Whether or not they have babies generally is not going to impact their salaries. So when competing with men with Canadian-born parents, there’s not so much they can do to decrease the pay gap. I think we’d have to see all the numbers before we could make any assumptions that suggest women of immigrants are somehow viewed more favorably than men of immigrants, or any other such conclusion.
November 22nd, 2007 at 8:40 pm
OK, yes, I like that. In fact, if we take that explanation as being valid I think we can also take it a little further.
Most immigrants are going to be from countries where the rights of women are not as well established as they are in Canada. Thus there will be familial pressure fo the young women to make the most of those opportunities, opportunities which were denied to their mothers and other female relatives. There’s also, I would think, a realisation by the young women themselves that they have said opportunities, and thus a greater hunger to make the most of them.