The ethnic and gender division of labor compared among immigrants to Los Angeles

This study compares the occupational profiles of six immigrant groups in the Los Angeles economy to expose details of the relationship between gender, nativity, time of arrival and labor market segmentation. We investigate the occupational division of labor among the foreign-born from Mexico, Fl Salvador, the Philippines, Guatemala, Korea and China and find that gender plays a dominant role relative to ethnicity in the process of labor market segmentation. We also discover that newly arrived immigrant men are more likely to enter male-dominated occupations than newly arrived women are likely to concentrate in female-dominated occupations. This tendency, however, varies in strength by nativity. Nativity and time of arrival also affect the anatomy of occupational specialization, but, again, this effect is not consistent across groups. Our observation of variability in the relative strength of gender and ethnicity in the determination of occupational profiles across a broad sample of immigrant groups directs future researchers to consider how ethnic resources are gendered in different ways by nativity.