The partnership, fertility, and employment trajectories of immigrants in the United Kingdom: An intersectional life course approach using three-channel sequence analysis

Julia Mikolai; Hill Kulu

doi:10.4054/DemRes.2025.53.10

Volume 53 - Article 10 | Pages 261–306

The partnership, fertility, and employment trajectories of immigrants in the United Kingdom: An intersectional life course approach using three-channel sequence analysis

By Julia Mikolai, Hill Kulu

Date received:

11 Sep 2023

Date published:

12 Aug 2025

Word count:

9788

Keywords:

employment, fertility, immigrants, multi-channel sequence analysis, partnership, United Kingdom

DOI:

10.4054/DemRes.2025.53.10

Supplementary Material:

53-10 supplement (pdf file, 348 kB)

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Abstract

Background: Although immigrants’ employment, partnership, and childbearing are intertwined, most previous longitudinal studies have focused on only one of these life domains.

Objective: We investigate gendered patterns of the co-evolution of the partnership, fertility, and employment trajectories of immigrants from different origin countries.

Methods: We use the UK Household Longitudinal Study and multi-channel sequence analysis to establish types of joint trajectories of partnership, fertility, and employment among immigrants. Applying multinomial logistic regression, we determine the characteristics of immigrants who experience each trajectory type. We conduct the analyses both together and separately for women and men.

Results: We find three types of trajectories. Immigrants in the ‘single, childless, students’ cluster arrive as and remain single and childless and are either in education or part-time employment. The second group of immigrants (‘partnered, childless, full-time employed’) arrive as single and childless but later become partnered and parents. They are in full-time employment. The third group is family migrants: they arrive as married, some have children at the time of arrival while others become parents soon after, and they are either employed or inactive. We found large differences between migrant men and women: While most men are in education or full-time employment, women stay inactive, especially family migrants.

Contribution: Taking an intersectional life course approach, we have shown that family and employment are mutually supportive life domains among immigrant men, whereas among immigrant women they are competing and often incompatible.