Siblings Caring for Their Parents Across Europe: Gender in Cross-national Perspective

• In Event: 3129 - Intergenerational Relationships

Abstract

A demographic transition around the world is increasing the proportion of adults over sixty and, as a result, the number who need care. After spouses, one’s children are the most common source of care to elderly, and that care is still disproportionally a women’s responsibility. We examine this gender gap in a range of European countries by focusing on siblings – sisters and brothers – as prior research has demonstrated that much division of caregiving labor for elderly parents happens within sibling sets. This paper uses Survey of Health, Ageing, and Retirement (SHARE) Wave 6 (2015) data to examine how brothers and sisters divide care to mothers and fathers, how that division of caregiving labor varies across four welfare regime clusters – Social Democratic, Christian Democratic, Mediterranean, and Eastern European, and what social factors shape this division of labor. We examine separately any care provided by non-resident adult children as well as more intense, at least weekly care that is provided by either coresident adult children or those residing elsewhere. We control for a wide range of child characteristics, sibship set characteristics, and parental characteristics in these analyses. For care of any frequency/intensity, women are more likely than men to provide care in Christian Democratic and Mediterranean clusters, while there is no significant gender gap in Eastern European countries and even a gap favoring sons in the Social Democratic cluster. Examining more frequent/intense care, we find that sisters are more likely to provide such care than brothers in Christian Democratic, Mediterranean, and Eastern European welfare regimes, while the gender gap in non-significant in the Social Democratic cluster. For both definitions of care, the gender gap is clearly most pronounced in the Mediterranean cluster. Importantly, when we focus on the more intense care, welfare regime explains most of the cross-national variation in gender gaps.

Authors

• Natalia Sarkisian, Boston College

• Naomi Gerstel, University of Massachusetts