Introduction

This book is an Australian economic analysis of the labour market status of Non-English Speaking Background (NESB) migrant women and Australian-born women. The book is empirical and will use econometric models to estimate the probabilities that women: (1) participate in labour market, (2) have primary sector jobs and (3) are unemployed. The Australian 1996 Census data will be used for the analysis.

This is an important matter because many Australian authors have suggested that NESB women are over represented in occupations that have low pay and poor working conditions. Because Australian governments have become increasingly concerned with equality of opportunity in the labour market. Thus this book will shed light on why labour market outcomes appear to be unequal, and what policy measures might be undertaken to redress the imbalance.

This book makes two major contributions to study the labour market status of women in Australia. First, it establishes a means of classifying women as primary sector or secondary sector employees, and examines the factors that make employment in the primary sector more likely. Second, it uses bivariate probit models that take into account interrelationships between the factors that determine whether or not women choose to participate in the labour market, and the factors that influence the positions within the labour market of participants.