Gender Equality and Family Caregiving: Things Are a-Changin’ - Finally
Women’s Equality Day is celebrated every August 26 to mark the passing of the 19th Amendment that gave women the right to vote in the U.S. Well, most women. It didn’t include Native, Asian, or Black American women. That came later.
Today, the day is about bringing awareness to the remaining obstacles to gender equality like achieving equal pay, enforcing equal participation, and gaining access to healthcare, which is considered a gender equality issue for several reasons ranging from barriers to accessing quality healthcare services to lack of education and awareness about health issues affecting women.
What is Gender Equality in Health?
Gender equality and health are closely related concepts. According to the Pan American Health Organization, equality in health means:
Women and men have equal conditions for realizing their full rights and potential to be healthy, contribute to health development, and benefit from the results.
Women and men have different needs, access to, and control over resources. These differences should be addressed in a manner that rectifies the imbalance between the sexes.
Fairness and justice in the distribution of benefits, power, resources, and responsibilities between women and men.
That last bullet is what I keep coming back to – fairness and justice in the distribution of responsibilities between women and men. The question I ask is how are we going to do this when many roles such as family caregiving often fall disproportionately on women? In many societies, women traditionally take on caregiver responsibilities for family members, including children, spouses, parents, or other relatives.
What Happens When Family Caregiver Responsibilities Fall to Women
When most of the family caregiving responsibilities fall on women, there can be several significant implications, some of which are:
Economic Impact: Women who take on caregiving roles often face disruptions in their careers, leading to lower earnings, reduced career advancement, and fewer retirement benefits. This can result in long-term economic disadvantages for women and contribute to the gender pay gap.
Work-Life Balance: Balancing caregiving responsibilities with work commitments can be challenging for women, leading to stress, burnout, and difficulty maintaining a healthy work-life balance.
Health and Well-being: The physical and emotional demands of caregiving can negatively impact women's health and well-being. They may experience higher levels of stress, depression, and other mental health challenges due to the pressure of caring for family members.
Interpersonal Relationships: Strained caregiving situations can lead to tension within families, affecting relationships between spouses, siblings, and other relatives.
Policy and Support Gaps: Societal norms that place caregiving on women can lead to insufficient support structures and policies. Adequate parental leave, flexible work arrangements, affordable childcare, and caregiver support services may not be readily available.
One major theme in the above issues is stress: economic stress, work-life balance stress, physical stress, and interpersonal stress.
Caregiving is Stressful – My Personal Experience with Family Caregiving
Caring for a family member can be highly rewarding, yet it also comes with significant stress. I speak from personal experience, as I am familiar with the role of a family caregiver. In 2006, both my parents became ill, and it was clear they needed live-in support. Although my brother lived closer to them and was single, my parents expected me to provide care. Please don’t get me wrong. I was perfectly willing to take care of my parents and happy to do so but it never occurred to them to ask my brother. My parents were born in the 1930s and grew up in the 1950s, and well, let’s just call them a bit old-fashioned about gender roles.
So, I said goodbye to my two little girls and husband to move in with my parents who lived over 2 hours away. Luckily, my job allowed me to utilize the Family and Medical Leave Act which provided for my family while I was gone, and secured my job for when I came back. Sadly though, a lot of women do not have that available to them.
While caring for my parents, my stress went through the roof. My mother, who was paralyzed from the chest down, was on at least 10 different medications and had a different doctor’s appointment every week. Understanding and managing her meds was the first big hurdle because every doctor we visited needed to know what she was on and why (this was before the widespread use of electronic medical records). She had bed wounds that needed to be attended to every day and it was imperative she get out of bed and into her wheelchair every day, which caused a lot of physical stress.
My father was in better shape, but our relationship, which was already a little rocky, was even more strained because I wasn’t attending to my mother like he wanted me to. I missed several of my daughter’s school functions and sporting events, which really taxed my husband because he became a single parent overnight.
My health and well-being suffered because it was no longer a priority. My only focus was keeping my parents healthy. I took care of my parents for two months. Fortunately, my parents were able to afford outside help, so I found two professional caregivers to take care of them in my absence.
The Number of Family Caregivers is Increasing
My caregiving experience with my parents was temporary. However, a recent study by the National Alliance for Caregiving, found that the number of full-time family caregivers caring for an adult or a child with special needs in the U.S. increased by 9.5M in five years (from 2015 – 2020) to total 53M. The study also revealed that family caregivers are in worse health compared to five years ago. As the demand for caregiving rises with an aging population, more must be done to support family caregivers.
There are Things We Can Do to Support Family Caregivers
At the beginning of this article, I asked how we are going to create fairness and justice in the distribution of responsibilities between women and men when many roles such as family caregiving often fall disproportionately on women. In the spirit of Women’s Equality Day and bringing awareness to gender equity, here are a few ways every one of us can help family caregivers:
Provide resources, education, and support for women caregivers to prioritize their own well-being.
Implement comprehensive caregiver support services to alleviate the burdens of caregiving.
Raise awareness about the physical, emotional, and economic toll of unequal caregiving roles.
Advocate for policies that support work-life balance, parental leave, and flexible work arrangements for all caregivers.
Encourage open discussions within families about caregiving responsibilities and promote equitable distribution.
Promote the involvement of men in caregiving roles and celebrate their contributions.
Recognize and value caregiving as a vital societal function, regardless of gender.
The Family Caregiving Revolution Has Begun
I am extremely encouraged that things are changing for family caregivers. In fact, recognition of family caregivers has never been higher at the national and state levels. In September 2022, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services released the 2022 National Strategy to Support Family Caregivers, which highlights nearly 350 actions the federal government will take to support family caregivers. It also listed 150 actions that can be adopted at other levels of government and across the private sector to build a system to support family caregivers. It recognizes that family caregivers provide most of the long-term care in the U.S. and lack the resources to maintain their health, wellbeing, and financial security while providing crucial support for others.
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services is finally recognizing that family members caring for adults and younger people are the backbone of our long-term care system. For the first time, Medicare will pay doctors and other providers to deliver critical support to the families of people with certain chronic conditions.
These actions mean better support for family caregivers. It gives them the respect they deserve which will improve the wellbeing of not just caregivers but their families too. It is a giant step towards gender equality.