Between Two Worlds: Source-Country Gender Roles and Gender Differences in Educational Attainment among Immigrant Children

Recent scholarship has focused on the relationship between source-country characteristics such as female labor force participation, fertility, level of economic development, gender role attitudes, and immigrants' labor market assimilation. These studies refer to national-level factors when accounting for the vast differences in home-country groups in labor market outcomes. This study asks to what extent these source-country characteristics affect immigrant children's educational outcomes. Using data from the 2006 Canadian Census and World Values Survey, this article examines the extent to which the gender gap in educational attainment among immigrant children is associated with source-country factors. Female child immigrants who come from countries with high female labor force participation and high levels of GDP have an advantage over their male counterparts in university education. Source-country gender role ideology played a role in university completion rates for immigrant parents, but not for child immigrants.