Caregiving is gendered: Implications for interpretation if our measure of caregiving is also gendered
Jenny Chanfreau (@JenChanf) provides some reflections on gendered patterns of how adults assist their ageing parents, analysed according to sibling composition. This post is based on Jenny’s article in Ageing & Society, and first appeared on the FemQuant blog.
Increasing longevity, declining family sizes and a projected informal care gap have raised concerns about the future demands on a potentially shrinking pool of kin carers. Against this backdrop, my co-author Alice Goisis and I analysed patterns of help and care given to ageing parents by only children and children with siblings at different ages in middle adulthood in a recently published article. We found that, among adults with at least one living parent, only children were more likely to provide parent-care at any of the ages we analysed, and caregiving increased with age among both siblings and only children. Consistent with prior research (e.g. Coward and Dwyer 1990; Grigoryeva 2017), we also found the patterns of parent-care were strongly gendered. This was not surprising; we know that caring is gendered. Mothers tend to spend more time on childrearing and, in paid work, women are over-represented in caring roles in health and social care. Research has shown that although adult children with siblings can share caring for ageing parents, a ‘main carer’ arrangement is common and gender is a strong organising principle within sibling groups. Sisters tend to provide more care to parents than their brothers. What about adult children without siblings - might only child status matter more than own gender?
We found that regardless of whether they had no siblings, or had brothers, sisters, or both, women were more likely than men to do ‘caring’ tasks for their parent(s) whereas men tended to be more likely than women to do (solely) ‘helping’ tasks (more on this helping/caring distinction later). Although the differences in rates of assistance given are small among men and among women, and the confidence intervals for the sibling groupings overlap, some consistent patterns emerge. First, among men, only sons had the highest predicted probability of providing parent-care at all ages we looked at, as was also the case with only daughters among women. At age 55 (shown below), only sons reported on average nearly seven hours per week assistance, approaching the intensity reported by some daughters with siblings. Second, the next highest probability of providing care among women was by those with at least one brother, while in contrast, among men, the lowest predicted probability of care provision was among those with at least one sister.
Predicted probabilities of providing help/care, and mean predicted weekly hours at age 55
Some may interpret this to suggest that men with siblings, and in particular sisters, are able to shirk caregiving. But if that were the case, would we not expect caregiving among men who are only children to be more similar to caregiving among women, since they have no siblings who would step up to meet parental needs?
Observing much smaller gender differences among spousal carers than other types of informal care, Sara Arber and Jay Ginn described men’s caregiving as ‘by default’ while women (also) tend to care out of kin obligation. They placed emphasis on co-residence for care to occur ‘by default’, and from our results ‘by default’ does not appear to extend to ‘in the absence of alternative carers’. In fact, we found gender and sibling status do not interact in a formal statistical sense as the association between gender and caregiving does not differ by sibling status. The balance of proportions doing solely helping tasks versus care among only sons is more similar to other men than to any of the groups of women. Further, at no age that we analysed were only sons more likely to provide care, nor did they report higher intensity on average, than any of the groups of women. Thus, although having no siblings is associated with greater caregiving, it seems gender is a more powerful determinant than sibling status.
But it is important to consider that caregiving is relational and the concept of ‘care’ is itself a gendered construction. Qualitative research with sons has shown substantively different caregiving than described by daughters, with Sarah Matthews and Jenifer Heidorn critiquing the literature for taking daughters’ approach as the standard for what counts as parent-care. As such, it is critical to reflect a bit on the data we used for our analysis and the implications of this for our measures of caregiving.
How can we carefully interpret and communicate gendered patterns we find in the survey data when our measure is based on a concept imbued with gendered meaning?
Most surveys of adults do not ask about own siblings so a key strength of the data we used for this analysis is that the studies have surveyed the same individuals from birth throughout the life course into middle age, meaning we were able to use information collected during childhood to identify ‘only children’ who did not grow up with siblings. But our survey data captured the particular study child’s perspective, which means we do not know about the parents’ need for care. Because we don’t know about parental care needs, we grouped tasks that the adult children reported doing for their parents into ‘care’ to try to identify tasks that are more likely to be done because the parent would struggle without assistance (e.g. bathing and dressing), and ‘help’ which are tasks that, while certainly helpful, might to a greater extent also reflect socialising and a close inter-generational relationship (e.g. lifts in the car).
This distinction, and the hierarchy it implies, however, may in part reinforce the gendered conceptualisation of what ‘counts’ as care, by designating more stereotypically female-coded tasks as ‘caring’. Consequently, the gender differences we observe may in part be an artefact of our helper/carer distinction. The higher rates of ‘helping’ among men should not be dismissed and if, as Matthews and Heidorn suggest, sons’ parent-care focuses less on ‘doing for’ and more on maintaining parental independence, then this may be what ‘caring’ by sons looks like in survey data. The implications of this point go beyond our specific paper and operationalisation of help and care. It may be widely acknowledged that for informal kin carers it is difficult to distinguish the caregiving from the wider relationship with the care recipient, and caring covers a wide range of assistance – from emotional support and ‘just being there’ to personal hygiene. However, in practice care is often equated with activities of daily living support such as feeding, washing, dressing.
I am by no means saying that reflecting on how we measure care may privilege a certain type of assistance explains away the differences we observe between sons and daughters - after all we see similar patterns when we look at hours among those who provide any assistance. Rather, I think this example highlights that our results reflect what is measured and how. Often both come with a lot of gendered conceptual baggage that may not be easily or immediately apparent but does complicate our interpretation of differences between men and women.
The full article this post reflects on is available open access: "Patterns of help and care by adult only children and children with siblings" by Jenny Chanfreau and Alice Goisis published 2022 in Ageing & Society.
Jenny Chanfreau is a Research Fellow in Demography at the UCL Social Research Institute at University College London and a member of the FemQuant organising collective. She completed her PhD in Gender Studies at the London School of Economics and Political Science in 2019 and prior to her doctoral research worked for several years as a quantitative data analyst at NatCen Social Research. Jenny’s research interests include family demography, gender and paid and unpaid work and family policy.
This post is part of the Women's Policy Action Tank initiative to analyse government policy using a gendered lens. View our other policy analysis pieces here.
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