The gender division of labor in family elder care

This study took a gender-difference approach to examine how men and women differ in the care they provide to their frail relatives in a home care setting. Specifically, the study aims to explore how (1) the primary activities of caregiving in terms of task involvement and the division of labor differ on the basis of gender; and (2) gender intersects with family relationship to influence caregivers' behaviors.;Aside from family relationship, gender is a significant predictor of the care provided by primary caregivers, particularly among child caregivers. In contrast to the overall lack of gender differences in task participation between spouse caregivers, sons and daughters differ in the level of participation in tasks that are an extension of women's reproductive roles but not in tasks that are congruent with men's gender roles. When caregivers' efforts are viewed in terms of networks of support, gender is the organizing principle of the division of labor in terms of both degree of task sharing and proportionate volume of care for both spouses and adult children, but only in labor-intensive personal care and housework domains. Other factors of significance include duration of care, the functional dependencies of the elderly, living arrangements, and additional adults residing in care recipients' household, but often according to the gender and family relationship of primary caregiver and to the type of tasks involved.;The significance of the gender effect throws into doubt the hypotheses of power/resources, time, and ideology of role, that have been used to explain the gender differences found in the often bivariate analysis of caregiving research. A feminist theory of gender stratification is drawn upon to explain these persistent gender differences in caregiving and to propose a model for future research in which power/resources, time, and ideology of roles are placed in the sex/gender system to examine their impact on the way men and women provide care.;With a multi-faceted quantification of the division of labor, this study examines primary caregivers' level of task involvement, task exclusivity, and relative contribution in a task domain analysis of multivariate logistic regression. The data showed that the intersection of gender and family relationship influences the way caregiving labor is carried out, especially in the lab r-intensive and time-demanding task domains. Governed by the normative expectations of marriage, spouses, both husbands and wives, show great commitment to caregiving even after a long period of providing care. After the deterioration of care recipients' health, they seem to have less discretion about what tasks to take on than do adult children. When primary caregivers' assistance is examined in the context of networks of support, spouses are not very different from adult children in the way they share tasks with other caregivers, although spouses remain the major care providers of their frail relatives.