Performance in the U.S. Labor Market

Approximately half of all immigrants to the United States are women, yet previous research on the labor market assimilation and performance of migrants has focused mostly on men. Given the increasing education levels of migrant women and their higher participation in the labor market, there are no excuses for the absence of the gender dimension in policy debates and research on migration and labor markets. Analysis of women’s labor market participation and performance levels is becoming especially important as many women are migrating individually for employment purposes, while their families stay at home. Furthermore, the edu-cational gaps between women and men are rapidly eroding in many migrant-send-ing developing countries, and we are observing higher levels of brain drain among educated women. Thus there is greater urgency for migration, development, and gender issues to be explored jointly. We address several interrelated questions in this chapter. As the vast literature on labor economics has shown in the context of women’s labor market outcomes, performance and participation levels need to be analyzed jointly, as employed women are not chosen from a random sample. Using empirical methods that control for such sample selection biases, we analyze the determinants of migran