How many years of life do Europeans spend providing unpaid family carework? How many years do older adults provide care post retirement? How does the gender gap in these years varies across countries?

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Care Life Expectancy: Gender and Unpaid Work in the Context of Population Aging (with co-author Jessica Polos)

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 Published in Population Research and Policy Review 

 * Winner of the Student Paper Award, Sociology of Population Section ASA 2020

 * AMM version

 

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Amid growing concern regarding the potential added burden of care due to population aging, we have very little understanding of what is the burden of care in aging populations. To answer this question, we introduce a novel metric that encompasses demographic complexity and social context to summarize unpaid care work provided across the life cycle at a population-level. The measure (Care Life Expectancy), an application of the Sullivan method, estimates the number of years and proportion of adult life that people spend in an unpaid caregiving role. We demonstrate the value of the metric by using it to describe gender differences in unpaid care work in 23 European aging countries. We find that at age 15, women and men are expected to be in an unpaid caregiving role for over half of their remaining life. For women in most of the countries, over half of those years will involve high-level caregiving for a family member. We also find that men lag in caregiving across most countries, even when using the lowest threshold of caregiving. As we show here, demographic techniques can be used to enhance our understanding of the gendered implications of population aging, particularly as they relate to policy research and public debate. 

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The Paid and Unpaid Working Life Expectancy at 50 in Europe

Journal of Gerontology: Social Sciences, 2021

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Amid growing concern about the economic implications of population aging and the sustainability of working life, demographers have overlooked unpaid work despite its direct relevance to population aging and its gendered implications. In this paper, I systematically compared the paid and unpaid working life expectancy at age 50 to understand the overlap and trade-off between paid and unpaid work among older European adults. I use recent data from the Survey of Health and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) and the Sullivan method to analyze the gender differences across 17 European countries. I find very little gender differences in the length of “working life” when unpaid work is included. However, I also find that women are expected to spend more years in caregiving roles, and men are expected to spend more years paid work (employed). Moreover, I find that grandchild care is a prominent component of caregiving years and that most of women’s caregiving years happen after retirement. These findings have implications for the debate concerning retirement age and pension reforms in aging societies and the gendered division of labor among older adults in aging societies.

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