Patterns of Individual Occupational Histories with Regard to Immigration in France and Gender Specificities

Alina Toader, Institut National d'Études Démographiques (INED)

Immigrants’ participation in the French labor market has been a salient research topic, often depicted as a major criterion for assessing the integration process within the host society or as a pointer for various types of discrimination. Based on such conceptualizations, many studies revealed important dissimilarities between immigrants and other population categories (e.g., as natives or “second generation migrants”) regarding their employment/unemployment rates, occupational status, their promotion chances. However, the trajectories leading toward the labor market participation as observed at a single point in time have rarely been studied, due to limited availability of longitudinal data. Therefore, this study uses data from the French “Histoire de vie” survey to compare, by gender, immigrants’ occupational histories to those of natives. It then restricts the analysis to the immigrant sample and examines occupational transitions experienced at migration, comparing the labor market trajectories lived before and after arriving in France.