Does Informal Eldercare Impede Women's Employment? The Case of European Welfare States

Abstract

European states vary in eldercare policies and in gendered norms of family care, and this study uses these variations to gain insight into the importance of macro-level factors for the work–care relationship. Using advanced panel data methods on European Community Household Panel (ECHP) data for 1994–2001, this study finds women's employment to be negatively associated with informal caregiving to the elderly across the European Union. For the countries included in the study, the effects of informal caregiving seem to be more negative in Southern Europe, less negative in Nordic countries, and in between these extremes in Central Europe. This study explains that since eldercare is a choice in countries with more formal care and less pronounced gendered care norms, the weaker impact of eldercare on women's employment in these countries has to do with the lesser degree of coercion in the caring decision.

Keywords:

• Informal care
• female labor supply
• European welfare states

Acknowledgments

The paper has benefited from comments by seminar participants at Norwegian Social Research, the Institute for Social Research, and Växjö University. I would also like to thank Dominique Anxo, Lennart Flood, Catherine Sofer, Nabanita Datta Gupta, Viggo Nordvik, Marta Szebehely, Katarina Katz, Måns Söderbom, Anita Nyberg, John Eriksen, Ola Olsson, Niklas Jakobsson, and three anonymous referees for useful comments. The research reported in this paper was supported by a grant from The Research Council of Norway (project EqualCare 196425/V50), which is gratefully acknowledged.

Notes

¹ Familialization of care refers to a process whereby families, rather than the state, are responsible for the care of dependent family members. Welfare states differ in the degree of familialization and some states actively work for de-familialization by taking over responsibilities for care. Proponents of the family democratization thesis view de-famialization as democratizing in the sense that it enables individuals to choose how and with whom to form a family. On the other side of the debate, proponents of the family demoralization thesis argue that de-familialization undermines family solidarity and they advocate a reversal of the process. That is, they long for a process of re-familialization.

² In total, they analyzed thirty-five studies where one was a multinational European study, one was a Canadian study, and the remaining studies were from the US or the UK.

³ The results are available upon request.

⁴ The sample restriction is intended to facilitate the identification of the relationship between informal care and employment and to reduce measurement errors. For example, in the dataset there are persons over 80 years of age who are not classified as retired but work for zero hours. A sensitivity analysis was conducted with other age limits, but the qualitative interpretation of the main results was unchanged. The results are available upon request.

⁵ It should be noted, however, that the results presented here are not completely comparable to those in Bolin, Lindgren, and Lundborg (2008b) since different data sources are used. Most notably, different results may be due to different operationalizations of the Nordic group: while this study uses Denmark and Finland, Bolin, Lindgren, and Lundborg (2008b) use Denmark and Sweden as a proxy for the Nordic countries.

⁶ In the countries classified as having less-developed formal care, less than 5 percent of the population aged 65 years or older receive formal home care or institutional care.

⁷ The control variables in this setting include marital status, age, age squared, education, bad health, children, and household wage. For further information, see Table 1.

⁸ The underlying regressions are available upon request.

⁹ Note that the specification is slightly changed for this model to work properly. Instead of including age and agesq, I included nine age dummies. It may actually make sense to drop the age dummies as well, since we cannot distinguish between age effects and time effects. This is so since the model is estimated in differences. In fact, a separate regression was run without age variables, and the interpretation of the results was the same.

¹⁰ The results are available upon request.

¹¹ The results are available upon request.

¹² The underlying regressions are available upon request.

¹³ I carried out the tests of significant differences between the groups by interacting care/carehrs with Central and Nordic in a pooled regression, letting South be the comparison group (dropping all countries not included in the typologies). The tests of differences between SSA and SSB were carried out in a similar fashion. The test results are available upon request.

¹⁴ I performed a final examination of the differences between the country groups by evaluating the effects for caregivers only, and the differences pointed in the same direction. The results are available upon request.

¹⁵ I use the same control variables as before, except that hourly wage is added.

¹⁶ The underlying regressions are available upon request.

¹⁷ Note that Heitmueller (2007) used a different specification: a quasi fixed-effects specification, where lags and leads of the care-dummy variable are included. It is also important to note that nothing in the analysis controls for time-variant endogeneity. I cannot account for the fact that people might provide care since they are, for instance, temporarily unemployed for nonpermanent reasons.