Canada's racialized immigrant women

Abstract

Immigrants have traditionally lagged behind labour outcomes of Canadian born workers, a fact that is more obvious for immigrant women and for recent arrivals (those entering Canada within the last five years). In this report we explore the barriers and challenges faced by racialized newcomer women in the Canadian labour market and how differences in their characteristics are (or aren't) related to differences in labour market outcomes. We use a specially designed survey to capture the experiences of a sample of racialized newcomer women regarding integration into the labour market and what resources and strategies have been most helpful in achieving career success and improving their quality of life. We follow with an in-depth analysis of the labour market environment of immigrant women to Canada using data from the Labour Force Survey and the O*Net database. This allows us to quantify to what extent immigrant women may be facing barriers and challenges in the labour market, not only along many standard measures of job quality, such as employment, pay, or type or contract, but also examining other non-standard measures of job quality that are informative of the resilience of the jobs immigrants hold, such as the tasks they perform in their jobs.