Siblings Caring for Their Parents Across Europe: Gender in Cross-National Perspective

Abstract

After spouses, children, especially daughters, are the most common source of elder care. We focus on sibling sets to examine the gender gap in caregiving labor for parents in a range of European countries. Using Survey of Health, Ageing, and Retirement (SHARE) Wave 6 (2015) data, we examine how brothers and sisters divide care, how that division varies across four welfare regimes—Social Democratic, Christian Democratic, Mediterranean, and Eastern European, and what social factors shape this division of labor. We examine separately any care provided by non-resident adult children as well as more intense, at least weekly care provided by either coresident or non-coresident children. We control for a wide range of child, sibship set, and parental characteristics and show, first, that daughters are more likely than sons to provide care of any frequency/intensity in Christian Democratic and Mediterranean countries, while there is no significant gender gap in Eastern European countries and even a gap favoring sons in the Social Democratic cluster. Second, examining frequent/intense care, we find that daughters are more likely to provide such care than sons in Christian Democratic, Mediterranean, and Eastern European countries, while the gender gap is non-significant in Social Democratic countries. Welfare regime explains most of the cross-national variation in gender gaps in intense care, highlighting the value of the welfare regime framework in studying gender gaps in caregiving. Cross-national variation in sibling division of caregiving labour demonstrates the power of social context to shape what some previously argued is an essential/invariant gender divide.