Immigrant Gaps in Job Quality: Canadian Immigrant Women's Resilience to Automation

ABSTRACT Gaps in job quality between immigrant and domestic‐born workers do not only concern pay but extend to other attributes. We consider resilience to technological change as a measure of job quality and analyze job tasks most likely to describe a non‐automatable job. We quantify the economic value of closing initial gaps in non‐routine cognitive job tasks for university‐educated women as equivalent to a 4% to 9% increase in their hourly wage. However, although immigrant resilience improves with time in Canada, most of the gains occur through routine cognitive tasks, generally believed to be subject to higher automation risk.