ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how major crises, specifically the Great Recession and the Covid-19 pandemic, have shaped occupational outcomes in the European Union through an intersectional lens, focusing on the compounded disadvantages associated with gender and migration background. Emphasising the growing importance of migrant women in the European labour force, it calls for a critical rethinking of conventional explanations of gendered labour market impacts during times of crisis, namely the buffer, substitution and segmentation hypotheses, to account for the multiple vulnerabilities faced by an increasingly heterogeneous workforce. Drawing on pooled cross-sectional data from the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) survey for the years 2007 to 2022 across 20 EU countries, the chapter examines gender- and migration-based inequalities in employment status, job quality and occupational segregation. Findings reveal that native workers remained relatively insulated from both crises. Notably, native women no longer fulfil their historical role as a flexible labour reserve. Instead, non-EU migrant workers, especially women, have assumed this “buffering” role, disproportionately absorbing employment shocks during economic downturns. These insights underscore the need to systematically integrate an intersectional perspective into labour market research and policymaking in order to fully capture how crises differentially affect Europe's increasingly diversifying workforce.
