Primary Sector Employment

In this chapter, we devise a scheme for categorising women into primary sector and secondary sector jobs, and conclude that amongst labour market participants, only 47.7% of NESB women had primary jobs, whereas 61.1% of Australian-born women had primary sector jobs. The models developed in this chapter investigate the extent to which this difference can be explained by a range of human capital and demographic variables.

We use probit models to examine factors that determine the probability that NESB and Australian-born women find employment in primary sector occupations. We assign occupations to the primary or secondary sector using the list of occupations provided in the 1996 Australian Census and a modified version of the ANU2 occupational prestige scale developed by Broom et al. (1977a). Our focus is on the possible disadvantage of NESB women vis-à-vis Australian-born women in acquiring “good jobs” for those migrants whose English skills are weak, and on the role of education in assisting women to gain primary sector employment.

We use a univariate probit model to estimate the probability that an individual will be employed in the primary sector.¹