Three times disadvantaged? Labor market participation among migrant mothers in Italy

Previous research has shown that Italian women with family responsibilities are considerably less likely to participate in the labor market compared to men. However, most studies have focused on the native population, disregarding whether in the Italian context women with an immigrant background face the same or worse difficulties in reconciling work and family. This is a relevant question, as migrant and native women may have different preferences and motivations regarding paid work, but they share the same local constraints in terms of welfare and family policies and thus face similar structural barriers to work-family reconciliation. This article uses data from two nationally representative surveys conducted in Italy to investigate: a) whether «family penalties» in labor market participation exist among migrants in Italy; b) if and how much they differ from those of natives; and c) whether these penalties can be explained by differences in attitudes towards labor market participation in the country of origin. For the purposes of this work, we rely on data from two surveys collected by the Italian Institute of Statistics: the SCIF survey «Social conditions and integration of foreign citizens» (ISTAT 2011-2012) and the AVQ survey «Multipurpose survey – Aspects of daily life» (ISTAT 2013). Our results not only confirm that being in a partnership and having young children dampens LFP among all women, but also that such associations are stronger among immigrant women than among natives. In other words, for immigrant women work-family reconciliation is more difficult to achieve compared to Italian natives, thus confirming the idea of a triple disadvantage in LFP for migrant women. Further, we find that women who come from countries with lower levels of support toward maternal employment also have lower levels of labor force participation.