Explaining the Gender Gap in Help to Parents: The Importance of Employment

Although it is well established that adult daughters spend more time giving assistance to their parents than do sons, the sources of this gender gap are not well understood. This paper asks: To what extent can this gap be explained by structural variation, especially the different rates of employment and kinds of jobs that women and men tend to hold? Using data from the National Survey of Families and Households (N = 7,350), the paper shows that both employment status and job characteristics, especially wages and self-employment, are important factors in explaining the gender gap in the help given to parents, and that these operate similarly for women and men. Key Words: caregiving, employment, gender, intergenerational, social support, work. Over the past couple of decades, a growing body of literature in a number of different fields finds a gender gap in help to kin: Women spend significantly more time giving help than do men. More specifically, most of this literature suggests that women are more likely to assist their own parents and, when married, more likely than their husbands to provide help to their spouse's parents (e.g., Allen, Blieszner, & Roberto, 2001; National Alliance for Caregiving and AARP, 1997; Stone, Cafferata, & Sangl, 1987; Walker, 2001; for an exception concerning help to parents-in-law, see Lee, Spitze, & Logan, 2003). Women's preponderance as providers of assistance to parents has been well documented but remains largely unexplained. To explain this difference between women and men, we can turn to broad theories developed to account for gender gaps in other kinds of family work, both in and outside the home. In their explanations of gender gaps in family work, many theories focus on the structural forces that operate in adult life (e.g., Epstein, 1988; Gerson, 1993; Risman, 1998). Though variously defined, these structural factors are typically understood as an array of material, objective, and external constraints and opportunities (Hays, 1994; Rubinstein, 2001). Structural explanations for the gender gaps in family work often emphasize the constraints and opportunities generated by the different employment experiences of women and men. Because men are more likely to be employed and, when employed, to have more lucrative and time-consuming or satisfying jobs than women, their jobs pull or push them away from family responsibilities (Gerson; Risman). When women have the same employment conditions as men, they will give the same amount of help as men; that is, once we take into account such different employment experiences, the structural model suggests, gender as a dichotomy is neutralized and will yield little independent effect. Alternative theories assert that structure cannot fully account for the gender gaps in family work. Some of these theories attribute gaps to an essential gender dichotomy rooted in biology (for reviews, see Epstein, 1988; Marini, 1990; Udry, 2000). Another set attributes them to psychological differences between women and men created by early socialization (Chodorow, 1978, 1999; Gilligan, 1982; Witt, 1994). Still another traces them to cultural factors that operate in adult life (Brines, 1994; Greenstein, 2000; Potuchek, 1997; West & Zimmerman, 1987). All of these alternative theories, irrespective of whether they focus on biology, early socialization, or cultural differences, assert that even when adult men and women are located in the same structural positions-more specifically, hold the same jobs-they differ in the amount of family work they do. According to these theories, we would expect a gender gap to exist even between women and men who are employed in the same kinds of jobs. We also would expect similar employment experiences to shape the help given to parents in different ways for adult women and men. This article seeks to determine how much of the gender gap in the amount of help given to parents is tied to distinctively structural forces, especially employment and its conditions, that operate in adult women's and men's lives. …