Discrimination and Health of Male and Female Canadian Immigrant

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to show the importance of discrimination based on race, ethnicity, language, religion, sex, sexual orientation, age, and disability on the self-rated health of male and female immigrants. Our data source is the Canadian General Social Survey (2004). Results show that immigrants report more discrimination than non-immigrants and female immigrants are more likely to report discrimination than male immigrants. Moreover, all types of perceived discrimination are inversely related to self-rated health for all groups, and the effect of perceived discrimination on poor health is stronger particularly for female than male immigrants. For most types of discrimination, female immigrants reported 1.1 to 2.5 times more health problems due to perceived discrimination than male immigrants. These ratios increased to 1.5 to 3.8 times in multivariate analyses that take into account the socio-demographic and socio-economic variables.