Do Gender-role Values Matter? Explaining New Refugee Women’s Social Contact in Germany

Abstract

This article investigates whether gender-role values are linked to refugee women’s social contact in Germany. By building on the “preferences–third parties–opportunities” framework, we explicate a direct and an indirect path through which gender-role values may be related to refugee women’s minority-majority, intra-minority, and inter-minority contact. By applying median regressions, marginal structural models, and inverse probability of treatment weighting to data from the 2016 IAB-BAMF-SOEP refugee survey, we show that refugee women’s own gender-traditional values and those of their partners are associated both directly and indirectly with less social contact for these women. Effects of gender-role values on refugee women’s social contact are more pronounced for minority-majority contact than for the other two types of social contact assessed. With the effects of refugee women’s and their partners’ gender-role values being rather small against alternative explanatory factors, we conclude that in contrast to the view traditionally held by the populist right, traditional gender-role values hold refugee women back from establishing social contact in the host society only to a very limited extent.