Is There for Migrant Female Workers a Double Wage Gap? The Italian Case

Marilena Giannetti , University of Rome La Sapienza
Vincenzo Salvucci, University of Cophenagen

The gender wage gap has produced a vast literature showing how women in the same occupation as men are almost always paid a lower salary in nearly in any country of the world (D. Weichselbaumer and R. Winter-Ebmer, 2015; S.Polachek 2019; ILO, 2019). Analogously, wage gaps between migrant and native workers are registered with equal frequency if not more so (OECD, 2019; Chiswick, 1978, W.C. Smith and Fernandez, 2017). Most of the studies focus on either the male-female or on the migrant-native wage gap and the relative empirical literature use widely the Oxaca-Blinder methodology to estimate that part of the wage gap that cannot be explained by differences in worker’s characteristics and that can therefore be considered due to discrimination. Only a handful of studies have been conducted for Italy (Venturini e Villosio, 2008; C Dell'Aringa, C Lucifora, L Pagani, 2015, Venturini et al, 2018 ). The innovative aspect of our work is that we study the double wage-gap for immigrant women in Italy for the period 2008-2019 and differently from Piazzalunga (2015), we apply both the standard Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition and the more recently developed decomposition methods based on matching (H. Nopo 2004) that makes it possible to eliminate the estimation bias due to different male and female workers’ characteristics distribution. Preliminary results show that a nonnegligible wage gap between men and women exists, and it is narrowing over time; whereas the gap between native and immigrant workers has increased during the recent economic crisis, for both men and women.

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 Presented in Session 43. Perspectives of Immigration and Their Integration