An Intersectional Approach to Labor Market Policy and Practice: Chances, Choices, and Strategies of Refugee Women in the German Labour Market

This paper argues that gender- and diversity-sensitive public policies, rules, regulations, and an intersectional approach to labour market policy and practice are inevitable for the successful inclusion of refugee women in the destination labour markets. However, a critical review of existing policies and programmes reveal that, despite promising initiatives at the global, national, and E.U. levels to recognize the diversity of refugees, there is still the prevailing issue of the lack of a gender- and diversity-sensitive perspective in policies and programmes designed for refugee women. Further, those policies and programmes reinforce existing gender- and racial- stereotypes, which disenfranchise the agency of refugee women, and further marginalize them in the labour market. Due to the multiplicity of identities that they embody, refugee women may encounter a variety of challenges, which generally intersect, interact, and eventually influence their chances, choices, and strategies in the labour market. However, those diverse needs and intersectional realities of refugee women, are far from being adequately realised, addressed, or targeted in existing labour market policies and programmes in Germany, or elsewhere in Europe. Against this background, by problematizing how those hegemonic gendered and racialized visualizations of the refugee experience eventually shape relevant public policy discourses, this paper discusses the need for an intersectional approach to labor market policy and practice, which would not only acknowledge the particularity and diversity of refugee women but also critically analyse and target those gendered- and racialized- features of the existing refugee integration policies and practice. By establishing that without careful consideration of how these policies and programs, as products of long-established institutional mechanisms of privilege, play a substantial role in augmenting intersectional inequalities in the labour market, it would not be possible to work through an efficient socio-economic integration for refugee women, this paper aims to contribute to the discussion on ‘how intersectionality may serve as a critical approach to policy analysis’, with the case of refugee women in the German labor market. Finally, by reflecting on the qualitative fieldwork research experience with refugee women in Germany from 2017 onwards, this paper aims to contribute to the discussion of ‘what intersectional methodologies are emerging', in a way that successfully identifies -and intervenes- in the implicit -and explicit- forms of institutional sexism and racism, that result in the marginalization of refugee women in the labor market in Germany, and beyond.