According to a report by the Institute for Fiscal Studies, Second-generation African, Caribbean and Asian people more likely to have a degree but also to be unemployed. This implies that employment discrimination is holding back second-generation African, Caribbean and Asian people in the jobs market even though they tend to be more highly educated.
The report suggests that people of that background whose parents emigrated to Britain were far more likely to get a university degree than their white British peers, but they faced much higher unemployment rates overall.
“Even though they were more likely to come from disadvantaged backgrounds, more than 50% of second-generation Indians, 35% of second-generation Pakistanis and Bangladeshis held university degrees, compared with 26% of white people. Young black and Asian people were less likely to be held back in education by their socioeconomic circumstances, thanks to higher levels of commitment and motivation, the authors observed,” The Guardian reported.
Second-generation Indian and Bangladeshi men were more than 20 percentage points more likely to end up in professional jobs than white British people from the same social background, while Indian and Caribbean women were more than 10 percentage points more likely to be in such roles.
Findings suggest that Pakistani and Bangladeshi women were 5 percentage points less likely than white people to be in professional or managerial jobs. The report warned that although second-generation ethnic minority groups from disadvantaged origins were more upwardly mobile than their white British counterparts, “they are less upwardly mobile than one would expect given their very high levels of educational attainment”.
