Use of Help by the Elderly: A Gender Issue?

The routine of instrumental activities of daily living is dependent on the living arrangement of the elderly person in the sense that the availability of a co-resident increases the opportunities for sharing the responsibility for the performance of these activities. However, women are at a higher risk than men to be widowed and to live alone. Thus, the availability of caregivers within the household may be lower for females than for males elderly. As a consequence, gender may appear as a confounder in the relationship between the use of help and the location of the caregiver within or outside the elderly person household. A correspondence analysis was run on a sample of elderly persons living in the community to examine this issue. The results of the analysis showed that elderly women rely predominantly on caregivers living outside of their home for the performance of nine activities reviewed in this study, while males rely predominantly on caregivers located within their household. Nevertheless, 20& of males and females assumed responsibility for the nine activities reviewed in this study while 15% of females relied on a resident for some of the activities and 15% of males relied on a non-resident. This study confirmed that caregivers are shouldering responsibilities for activities. But this help is not structured in the same way for elderly males and elderly females with importance consequences for policy. For example, 30% of the elderly with a non-resident caregiver wished to live in a senior housing project in this study, while 17% expressed this wish among those with a resident caregiver. There is some scattered research evidence that the behavior of elderly males and females toward use of formal and informal help for activities of daily living differs. These gender differences may depend in part on health status, division of household labour and links with family and friends. These factors may affect not only the availability of help, but also the sources of help. If this is the case, use of help is structured differently for male and for female elderly. We argue in this paper that differences in sources of help for male and female elderly have wide ranging implications for a better understanding of the role of informal support for the elderly and for links between informal and formal sources of help.