Care Life Expectancy: Gender and Unpaid Work in the Context of Population Aging

Amid growing concern regarding the potential added burden of care due to population aging, we have very little understanding of what is the burden of care in aging populations. To answer this question, we introduce a novel metric that encompasses demographic complexity and social context to summarize unpaid family care work provided to children, elderly, and other family members across the life cycle at a population level. The measure (Care Life Expectancy), an application of the Sullivan method, estimates the number of years and proportion of adult life that people spend in an unpaid caregiving role. We demonstrate the value of the metric by using it to describe gender differences in unpaid care work in 23 European aging countries. We find that at age 15, women and men are expected to be in an unpaid caregiving role for over half of their remaining life. For women in most of the countries, over half of those years will involve high-level caregiving for a family member. We also find that men lag in caregiving across most countries, even when using the lowest threshold of caregiving. As we show here, demographic techniques can be used to enhance our understanding of the gendered implications of population aging, particularly as they relate to policy research and public debate.