The role of neighbourhood ethnic concentration on gender role views: A study of ethnic minorities in England and Wales

Abstract

A key issue in migrant integration research and policy debates is whether the spatial concentration of migrants and their children has an effect on their objective and subjective outcomes. This study contributes to this literature by studying the effect of neighbourhood ethnic concentration on one of the most controversial and culturally embedded subjective outcomes: individuals’ gender role views (GRV). The study uses large-scale nationally representative individual-level data covering England and Wales, linked to local area information from the 2011 Census on the concentration of co-ethnics. It focuses on groups that have, on average, relatively strong traditional views on gender roles: Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis and Africans. Results show a positive relationship between living in ethnically concentrated neighbourhoods and holding more traditional GRV among Bangladeshis and Indians; however, there is no such effect for Pakistanis and Africans. I do a series of sensitivity tests to explore neighbourhood self-selection; these suggest that the effect for Bangladeshis may be (partially) driven by this phenomenon.