The culture of employment: a study of immigrant women's attitudes about working in Malmö, Sweden

Sweden has long been recognized as an egalitarian Nordic welfare state, which promotes generous labor and citizenship rights for its residents, including women and immigrants. In cultural discourse and academic studies, high labor force participation signifies social equality for women, as well as successful integration for immigrants. This paper uses the experiences and attitudes of immigrant women in Sweden as a platform to study the links between Sweden’s progressive gender norms, employment culture, and immigration policies. I examine pre-immigration and post-immigration factors that may affect women’s attitudes about working after they move to Sweden. I categorize this research as a study of “cultural employment integration” to signify that it combines notions of cultural and economic immigrant integration. I designed the study to take into account the diverse cultural factors in immigrant women’s lives in order to question common notions about whether and why immigrant women would like to be employed. The empirical foundation for this paper is 22 interviews I conducted with 23 immigrant women living in the “multicultural” city of Malmö, Sweden, in 2012. I asked interviewees about their family backgrounds, immigration histories, work experiences, and beliefs about familial responsibilities, both before and after moving to Sweden. Five common trends emerged as important to women’s attitudes about work: mothering, family experiences, educational experiences and attitudes, Swedish language skill, and participants’ perceptions of gender norms in their home countries and in Sweden. These five facets are central to the gender equality discourse in Sweden. The discussion expands previous studies of immigration by considering the effects of gender, ethnicity, previous experiences, and citizenship on women’s post-immigration attitudes. The results may be useful to consider when designing cultural and employment integration programs for immigrant women