Raining stones? Female immigrants in the Spanish Labor Market

The aim of this paper is to analyze how female migrants fare in the labor market in Spain, a country that has experienced impressive immigration flows during the last decade. Particularly, we explore the differential access to employment and the earnings penalty faced by this group considering the interaction between two potential sources of disadvantage for migrant women: gender and migrant condition. Our findings suggest that migrant women do face this double negative disadvantage. In both cases, we find an economically significant gap, at least for migrants from non-developed countries. Regarding the former, the larger unemployment rate of female migrants is not explained by observable characteristics. In the case of earnings differential, although human capital endowments play a relevant role, both the unexplained earnings penalty associated with gender and migrant status slightly rise across the distribution of wages, suggesting the existence of a sort of glass ceiling for female immigrants.