Do Highly Educated Daughters of Immigrants Return to Work After Childbirth? Evidence From Descendants of Pakistani and Vietnamese Immigrants in Norway

Abstract

Concerns about whether highly educated daughters of non-Western immigrants will make use of their education after family formation or will instead follow a gender-based division of labour and childcare have been raised in Western Europe. Drawing on theoretical arguments from human capital theory, socio-cultural approaches and mechanisms of the 'immigrant drive,' this study investigates work re-entry following childbirth among highly educated descendants of immigrants from Vietnam and Pakistan. By exploiting unique population-based data from Norwegian public registers, Cox proportional hazards regressions show that descendants of Pakistani immigrants are less likely to return to work following childbirth. However, the difference between daughters of Pakistani immigrants and their native peers is no longer statistically significant when looking at return to full-time work. The chance of returning to work per se among descendants of Vietnamese immigrants does not differ from native majority women. Consistent with the literature, this study demonstrates that education level is probably the most important determinator for return to work following childbirth-irrespective of immigrant background. Overall, the results indicate that the highly educated descendants of immigrants are similar to their highly educated majority peers in organising their working life and childcare in the gender-egalitarian Norwegian welfare state.