The working mother-in-law effect on the labour force participation of first and second-generation immigrant women in the UK

ABSTRACT

There are clear differences in labour force participation rates of women of immigrant origins, both first and second generation, across a range of European countries. Many of these differences, particularly for women with low participation rates, are not fully explained in existing studies. I argue that to better understand differences in labour force participation, and the role of ‘culture’ in shaping them, we need to take account of the context provided by previous generations of women. While mothers may transmit expectations regarding participation directly to their daughters through intergenerational transmission and childhood socialisation, mothers-in-law may also be important in indirectly influencing their daughters-in-law through their sons’ behaviours and attitudes. Using the UK large-scale household panel study Understanding Society, the contribution of this paper is to investigate the ‘mother-in-law effect’ in the UK. I shed light on the extent to which partnered women’s participation is affected by the work status of their partner’s mother. I find a positive association between a working mother-in-law and female labour force participation, which remains sizeable after accounting for individual-level characteristics. I also show that Pakistani and Bangladeshi women’s participation is more sensitive to the work status of their mothers-in-law than that of other groups.

KEYWORDS:

• Labour force participation
• working mother-in-law
• gender
• migration status
• ethnic origin

Acknowledgements

I am grateful for comments on the paper from participants at the following conferences: RC28, Bern August 2016; 12th Spanish Conference of Sociology, Gijón June 2016; UNED Research Seminar, Madrid March 2017; and Understanding Society Scientific Conference, University of Essex July 2017. I am also thankful for the comments of Professors Lucinda Platt, Alita Nandi, Hans-Peter Blossfeld, Héctor Cebolla-Boado and Fabrizio Bernardi on earlier versions of this paper. I would also like to thank my colleagues Enrique Hernández, Ludvig Lundstedt and Juan Masullo for their support and useful comments. Understanding Society is an initiative funded by the Economic and Social Research Council and various Government Departments, with scientific leadership by the Institute for Social and Economic Research, University of Essex, and survey delivery by NatCen Social Research and Kantar Public. The research data are distributed by the UK Data Service.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Albert F. Arcarons http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4328-255X

Notes

1 The reason why the reported activity rates are higher than for instance the ones reported by the UK’s Office for National Statistics (around 83 per cent for men and 74 per cent for women in 2013) (ONS 2018) is because I focus on ‘potentially active’ people, or those who are not in full-time education, early retirement or disabled/sick. By excluding these categories of inactivity from the denominator, the activity rate necessarily increases. I do not consider these categories as I am interested in ‘voluntary’ non-participation.

2 In this paper I do not use the 2011 census ethnic group categories. I instead measure ‘ethnic origin’ based on the information on own, parents and grandparents’ country of birth. I describe in detail the operationalisation of this variable in the ‘Data, Variables, and Methods’ section.

3 By ‘partnered women’ I refer to women living either with their partner or their spouse in the same household. Similarly, I use ‘mother-in-law’ to refer to the mother of the woman’s partner even if they are unmarried. For simplicity, I use ‘partner’ and ‘mother-in-law’ throughout to refer to relationships based both on marriage and cohabitation.

4 I use GRA and ASDL interchangeably throughout the text.

5 The term ‘ethnic closure’ derives from the concept ‘social closure’, which refers to the process of identity formation within a rather closed boundary drawn by a given social group. Based on this, Maliepaard and Alba (2016) refer in their paper to a particular sub-group within Muslims in the Dutch context.

6 Due to sample size constraints, the ‘African’ category is necessarily diverse. Of all ethnic origin categories, it is the only one that includes more than one country of birth, namely Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria and Uganda. These four are the African countries of birth with larger sample sizes.

7 Note that because I draw upon country of birth to define ethnic origin, I have a category of Jamaican rather than the standard ethnic group category Black Caribbean. The majority of UK Caribbean did come from Jamaica, but to the extent that there are differences among them, I am primarily capturing the experience of those of Jamaican origin.

Additional information

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.