The Cumulative Devaluation of Care: Gendered Lifetime Economic Consequences of Paid and Unpaid Care Work

• In Event: Families and the Care Crisis

Abstract

Despite ongoing scholarly interest in care work, most research focuses on its immediate economic impacts and less on how care structures inequality in the long-run. Using 1976-2023 PSID data, I take a life-course approach to examine the cumulative economic consequences of care’s devaluation. I document the timing and likelihood of providing paid care, unpaid adult care, and unpaid childcare between ages 25-64 for a cohort born in the 1950s, estimating care’s cumulative impact on lifetime earnings and employment by gender. Preliminary results show that a full adulthood of care provision is associated with lifetime economic premiums for men but penalties for women, patterns driven primarily by unpaid care work. In contrast, careers in paid care have similar lifetime economic penalties for men and women. Taken together, my early findings suggest that point-in-time approaches common in the care penalties literature vastly understate the enduring economic consequences of paid and unpaid care work.

Author

• Emily Curran, University of Pennsylvania