Combining paid work and family life can be considered as a key issue in contemporary European societies in terms of productivity, reproduction and social gender equality. Traditionally attention in reconciliation issues has been mostly given to child care. Much less attention has been paid to the second caring phase in the life course, at the time parents or relatives become frail and need somebody to care for. This asymmetry in interest certainly mirrors the asymmetry in the incidence of those two experiences within the working age population. Yet, given the triple phenomena of increasing the labour force participation of women, increased life expectancy and regulations raising the pension ages, this proportion is bound to increase in the next years. The research on the issue of reconciliation of elderly care and paid work still deserve deeper attention (Hessel and Keck, State of art Report for Equalsoc, 2009). Firstly, methodological approaches that better allow to sort out the effects of becoming a caregiver on work participation; Secondly, it would be promising to use cross-national and comparative analyses in order to better capture the role of the different institutional and cultural contexts. Finally, it seems necessary to develop more sophisticated theoretical and empirical tools allowing to identify which are the underlying mechanisms related to gender, educational and occupational attainment that make care giving incompatible with paid work. The paper addresses the above mentioned issue trying to face some of the shortcomings of the research in the field. The main research questions raised in the paper are the following: Which are the main European country-specific differences among working care-givers? That is, who and when, in the different national contexts, has to combine elderly care work with market paid work? How, and under which conditions, combing work and elderly care has a negative effect on gainful employment? The analysis is based on the European Labour Force Survey (ELFS) from 2005, where an ad hoc module on work and reconciliation was used. The ELFS database ensures enough information to answer some of the questions on the issue still under researched. Moreover the ELFS database has been enriched with added information collected elsewhere, in order to reconstruct the different cultural and institutional contexts in which individuals and families make their choices. Both descriptive and multivariate analysis are performed in order to evaluated which are the main factors influencing decisions in relation to taking up care and giving up (or not) paid work.
New dilemmas in the reconciliation of employment and care: when and how caring for the elderly affects employment
NALDINI, Manuela;SOLERA, Cristina
2010-01-01
Abstract
Combining paid work and family life can be considered as a key issue in contemporary European societies in terms of productivity, reproduction and social gender equality. Traditionally attention in reconciliation issues has been mostly given to child care. Much less attention has been paid to the second caring phase in the life course, at the time parents or relatives become frail and need somebody to care for. This asymmetry in interest certainly mirrors the asymmetry in the incidence of those two experiences within the working age population. Yet, given the triple phenomena of increasing the labour force participation of women, increased life expectancy and regulations raising the pension ages, this proportion is bound to increase in the next years. The research on the issue of reconciliation of elderly care and paid work still deserve deeper attention (Hessel and Keck, State of art Report for Equalsoc, 2009). Firstly, methodological approaches that better allow to sort out the effects of becoming a caregiver on work participation; Secondly, it would be promising to use cross-national and comparative analyses in order to better capture the role of the different institutional and cultural contexts. Finally, it seems necessary to develop more sophisticated theoretical and empirical tools allowing to identify which are the underlying mechanisms related to gender, educational and occupational attainment that make care giving incompatible with paid work. The paper addresses the above mentioned issue trying to face some of the shortcomings of the research in the field. The main research questions raised in the paper are the following: Which are the main European country-specific differences among working care-givers? That is, who and when, in the different national contexts, has to combine elderly care work with market paid work? How, and under which conditions, combing work and elderly care has a negative effect on gainful employment? The analysis is based on the European Labour Force Survey (ELFS) from 2005, where an ad hoc module on work and reconciliation was used. The ELFS database ensures enough information to answer some of the questions on the issue still under researched. Moreover the ELFS database has been enriched with added information collected elsewhere, in order to reconstruct the different cultural and institutional contexts in which individuals and families make their choices. Both descriptive and multivariate analysis are performed in order to evaluated which are the main factors influencing decisions in relation to taking up care and giving up (or not) paid work.
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