The Upward Occupational Mobility of Immigrant Women in Spain

This paper studies the upward occupational mobility trajectories of immigrant women performing unskilled work as a first job in Spain. The goals of the research are to go beyond the debate that focuses on the structural elements that condition their labour trajectories in Spain and to include both personal factors and the way in which these women use their agency in order to shape their labour trajectories. We have opted for a mixed-method approach, using data from the National Immigrant Survey ENI-2007, combined with 42 socio-biographical interviews with immigrant women from Latin America living in the metropolitan areas of Barcelona and Madrid.