When Gender Trumps Everything: The Division of Parent Care Among Siblings

While previous research on the gender division of family labor consistently finds that " gender trumps money, " recent studies of the gender division of parent care report a rather surprising finding – that gender itself is trumped, though not by money but by kin relations. Arguing that most gender division of parent care takes place among brothers and sisters rather than husbands and wives, this article shifts the focus from married couples to sibling networks and examines how adult children share caring responsibilities for their parents. Using a large, nationally representative dataset, the author reports direct, indirect, and structural effects of gender on parent caregiving. First, daughters provide more care to their elder parents than sons, net of other factors. Second, daughter's caregiving appear to be more elastic than sons' with respect to constraints and resources associated with parent caregiving. Finally, not only the focal child's gender, but also his or her siblings' genders appear to be important in explaining parent caregiving. In 1900, the elderly – persons 65 years or older – constituted only four percent of the U.S. population. By 2010, this segment represented 13 percent of the population, about one in every eight Americans. In absolute terms, the number of elderly people has grown from 3 million to 40 million – an increase of over 1,100 percent. There are more elderly Americans today than ever before and the number is expected to grow in the future (Federal Interagency Forum on Aging-Related Statistics 2012). As a fundamental demographic transformation, the graying of the American population has sweeping social, economic, and geopolitical implications (Jackson and Howe 2008). One that has received wide attention both in academia and among the general public is the growing demand for elder care. For most of the nation's history, across all socioeconomic levels and within all racial and ethnic groups, elder care has been a family affair largely carried out by women (Bookman and Kimbrel 2011). However, recent socio-demographic trends have important implications for the relative caregiving roles of women and men. The widespread entry of women into the labor market has challenged the view of women as caretakers for the home and family (Shelton and John 1996). The concurrent erosion of wages for men has undermined their ability to be the main family breadwinner (Lewis 2001). Labor market participation has also reduced women's availability to provide care. Although fertility decline has helped …