International family migration and differential labour-market participation in Great Britain: is there a ‘gender gap’?

Drawing upon studies of subnational (internal) family migration, in this paper we link international family migration to differential labour-market participation in Great Britain. We extend Kofman’s fourfold categorisation of international family migration processes to develop a typology of scenarios that acknowledge the important role of the family. We match scenarios to different outcomes using a subsample of partnered migrants from the Sample of Anonymised Records (SAR) of the 1991 Census. In line with subnational family migration literature, descriptive analyses of the SAR point to a ‘gender gap’ between the labour-market participation of partnered men and partnered women moving into Great Britain between 1990 – 1991, with males twice as likely to be attached to the labour force compared with women. We contribute to debates on changing family organisation and employment returns to international migration by arguing that the magnitude of this gender gap varies across migration scenario and family structure. In this paper we stress the need for more interchange between international and subnational family-migration scholarship, and provide valuable entrees for analyses of the forthcoming microdata of the 2001 Census