Abstract
Recent changes in the organization of long-term care have had controversial effects on gender inequality in Europe. In response to the challenges of ageing populations, almost all countries have adopted reform measures to secure the increasing resource needs for care, to ensure care services by different providers, to regulate the quality of services, and overall to recalibrate the work-life balance for men and women. These reforms are embedded in different family ideals of intergenerational ties and dependencies, divisions of responsibilities between state, market, family, and community actors, and backed by wider societal support to families to care for their elderly and disabled members. This article disentangles the different components of the notion of ‘(de)familialization’ which has become a crucial concept of care scholarship. We use a fuzzy-set ideal type analysis to investigate care policies and work-family reconciliation policies shaping long-term care regimes. We are making steps to reveal aggregate gender equality impacts of intermingling policy dynamics and also to relate the analysis to migrant care work effects. The results are explained in a four-pronged ideal type scheme to which European countries belong. While only Nordic and some West European continental countries are close to the double earner, supported carer ideal type, positive outliers prove that transformative gender relations in care can be construed not only in the richest and most generous welfare countries in Europe.
Highlights
Care is a complex system at the intersections of several human relations, social practices, and public affairs that shape the demand, provision, and norms of managing physical and emotional assistance to people in need
In the particular steps of applying fuzzy-set ideal type analysis (FSITA) we follow the sequences suggested by Kvist (2007): First, we anchor our typology to theoretically defined ideal types; we operationalize our theoretical expectations related to the ideal types at the level of empirical variables; third, we calibrate the values of variables; and we assess the conformity of national longterm care (LTC) policies to the ideal types
While none of the countries conform to the male breadwinner ideal type, half of the EU member states do not clearly belong to any of the LTC ideal types
Summary
Care is a complex system at the intersections of several human relations, social practices, and public affairs that shape the demand, provision, and norms of managing physical and emotional assistance to people in need. Care embodies and shapes various gender in/equality patterns, including the sharing of care responsibilities in family and societal settings, and the access to jobs of variegated social security and pension consequences. When migration becomes a major link between different components of care systems, gender equality considerations multiply. Recognition of domestic care as paid work creates opportunities for others (mostly women) to pursue paid employment within the domestic sphere. All this has tangible, in many respects transformative, impacts on gender relations in society, but does unleash new forms of inequalities as well
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