Economics, multiculturalism, and gender:competing factors influencing women’s economic behaviour in multicultural setting

Yaghoob Foroutan, Australian National University

This paper examines key factors affecting women’s economic behaviour in Australia’s multicultural setting. Economic behaviour, here, refers to employment status and occupation. The multicultural context provides opportunity to compare natives and immigrants in labour market, as there is chance of comparing immigrant groups from four corners of the world classified by region of origin. Based on human capital and assimilation hypotheses, the paper focuses on human capital investments and assimilation components: education, English competence, duration of residence, and region of origin. Meanwhile, roles of family formation and age are considered. The study is relied on special tabulation of 2001 census data provided by Australian Bureau of Statistics, dealing with approximately 5,373,000 women in economically active (75, 25 percent are natives and overseas born, respectively). Employing SPSS, particularly logistic regression, enable us to examine competing implication of each determinant highlighted in the literature while simultaneously controlling for other variables in models.