Gendered Neighborhood Networks and the Labor Market Integration of Female Refugees

Sebastian Bähr , Institute for Employment Research (IAB)
Kerstin Ostermann, Institute for Employment Research (IAB)

In being female and from a different ethnic background than the host society, female refugees experience not only gender- and ethnicity-based obstacles, but also an additional dimension of social inequality due to the intersection of these two categories. Initial studies prove this claim in showing that only 30\% of the female refugees entered employment seven years after their arrival in Germany, whereas 70\% of male refugees did so in the same period. To examine potential mechanisms to overcomes those obstacles, we focus on the potentials of high-value port-of-entry neighborhoods as information providers and role-model mediators. We combine individual-level administrative data on female refugees from the Federal Employment Agency with georeferenced information on gendered employment rates for natives, foreigners, and refugees on the level of 1km x 1km grid cells. In exploiting the variation in wider neighborhoods and between grid cells, we estimate the causal effect of full-time employment rates of female neighbors on female refugees' employment probability. Initial results show a positive effect of full-time employment of female neighbors in the first three years after arrival in Germany.

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 Presented in Session 17. Refugees