Kurzbeschreibung

The number and intensity of conflicts in the last decade has caused an all-time high in the number of individuals seeking humanitarian protection abroad. Prominently, the war in Syria forced more than 5 million men, women and children to leave their homes and seek refuge in neighboring countries (i.e. Lebanon, Turkey, and Jordan), but also in European countries such as Germany. Receiving societies face the challenge of incorporating refugees into their society and their labor markets in particular. Women and men globally seek refuge in similar terms. Yet, women are more likely to travel with their families rather than alone and to provide most of the unpaid carework, leaving them in less favorable positions to participate economically. On the receiving labor markets, refugee women additionally face the overall disadvantages related to their immigration status and to forced migration in particular. As a result, refugee women are less likely than their male counterparts to be in paid work and receive lower average wages. With a growing refugee population worldwide and the growing challenges to provide substantiate living standards for them, it is essential to understand the mechanisms explaining these gaps. Most literature, however, focuses on the employment gaps of immigrants vs natives or compares different immigrant groups. Little is known on the specifics of the refugee gender gap on receiving labor markets. Kosyakova et al. (2023) are the first to decompose the refugee gender gap in Germany and relate the large gap to a lower resource endowment of refugee women. Namely, men are usually more mobile and more flexible than refugee women because they are typically not in charge of carework and household chores. They furthermore arrive with a higher educational attainment on average and have more opportunities to invest in human and social capital after arrival. Importantly, the human capital refugee women typically carry requires more post-migration human capital investment: they are more likely to have work experience in language-intensive or knowledge-intensive jobs (e.g. in teaching) which require country-specific knowledge and skills as well as and advanced host country language proficiency. This means that their resources yield less returns and are more costly to transfer. A final major disadvantage is worse average health outcomes among refugee women. In addition to individual determinants, the receiving contexts largely shape employment outcomes. Economic conditions, labor market characteristics, social support structures, as well as immigration and integration policies are major factors in refugees' post-migration activities. This project therefore extends the analysis of refugees' gendered employment patterns to Lebanon, Turkey, and Germany, based on the TRANSMIT Surveys of Syrian nationals and their Neighbors in Turkey and Lebanon combined with the IAB-BAMF-SOEP Survey of Refugees in Germany. This cross-country comparison design allows us to assess the heterogeneous mechanisms that shape these gender gaps in the various receiving labor markets while taking into account individual factors.