We know, and employers know, that mothers are more likely to be more absent from work than fathers to take care of ill children or to pick them up from school; so in this sense their care responsibiliteis are more likely to interfere with their work commitments. Of course this doesn’t hold for individual women, yet it is more likely to occur among mothers than among fathers. The implication is that all other things equal, employers will prefer to hire a father (or non-parent who is not likely to become a mother – i.e. an older women or a men) than a mother (or someone likely to become a mother soon); or else they will only hire (potential) mothers if they are happy with lower wages. As the theory says, and I fear practice shows, this is the rationality of statistical discrimination.

Yet I still am not entirely sure that this discrimination against carers would contradict that non-carers underestimate the burdens of care; rather, they know the fact that carers are more often absent from work. That’s not enitrely the same thing. They may, for example, still believe that caring is a leisurely and thus easy or light activity, but one that requires the mum to be home by 4 pm or whenever the child is ill.

I apologize for not putting my thoughts more clearly.

I was not thinking of discrimination in the field of pay for care work. My thought was that if mothers in general are paid less, for jobs that are filled by both mothers and non-mothers (a result that seems to be fairly well-supported by salary studies), the people setting pay apparently observe and/or believe that the care work requires significant effort.

I’ll check out the specific refefences that people have suggested – perhaps there is more substantive material there that we can discuss at a later stage. Like Colin, the (little) literature that Iv’e read is all etnographic (and hence I’m eager to also learn something from more quantitative research).

Matt, I use the term ‘informal’ in the sense of not officially registered in the economy – often this is also family care, but it could also be care for a neighbour or a friend; and most of hte time it is unpaid, but sometimes siblings pay one of them to do the care for an elderly dependent parent (so it also need not always be unpaid, though I assume in most cases it is).

thanks also to the references to the Ethics of Care and the Economics of Care – both literatures I do in fact know (at least quite a bit of it), and I don’t think they are precisely addressing this question (then, I tend to agree with those of you who think that it would not be that easy to do an empirical study on this question).

SamChevre (@34) – why would that be a contradiction? In contrast, I think the two things could go together: if caring (whether formal or informal) is seen as ‘light’ work, then surely you don’t need to pay a lot for that, do you? Or am I missing the point you are trying to make?

There is a burgeoning literature on the burdens of caregiving. Carol Levine does some excellent work on this, both theoretically grounded and rooted in the narratives of her own experience as a LTC-caregiver. One caution is that apparently “care” means very different things to different people, so it might be a difficult concept to investigate in a manner that controls for relevant confounders. There is a good 2006 article on this in, I believe, soc. of health & illness (in context of the therapeutic misconception, not in context of caregiving).

In addition, we have a plethora of evidence that able-bodied persons dramatically underestimate the reported QOL enjoyed by even severely impaired persons; perhaps an analogy can be drawn to experiences of caregiving adduced by non-caregivers? I think that there are some relatively recent think-tank reports on this subject as well; it actually made some news in the most recent congressional session as well, so there may be some government reports on this.

If you’re really interested, email me, and I’ll see what sources I can turn up quickly.

1. Simple naivete about the difficulty of something you have not done.

2. An ideology that carework springs from love, is “natural,” and hence cannot be coded as work.

3. The effect BPhD notes, and which Marjorie DeVault (_Feeding the Family_ U Chicago 1991) is brilliant on: that effective carework sometimes entails concealing the work from the cared-for.

4. People who receive more carework than they provide may have an interest in underestimating said work. You can think of this in psychological or structural terms depending on your taste in theory.

I don’t know of the kind of study Ingrid is asking for, though—all the research I can think of is more or less ethnographic. It would be interesting, if someone had the resources, to try and separate some of the above possible effects.

Is the “surprise” really the burden, or rather the disassociation to that has occurred over the past few decades and a new, re-revelation of it? Proper estimating takes experience, without which one is likely to run head first into, “They misunderestimated me.”

People sure seem keen enough on avoiding the care of their sick, elderly relations, that I always assumed that it was because they had a healthy respect for what that entails. What is most remarkable about our society, in contrast to more traditional societies, is precisely the wide extent of the shirking of this responsibility, which makes me think that people generally have some grasp of how onerous it is. The professionalization of such care goes way beyond the strictly medical intervention services that actually require professionals, and well into supportive care that lay people could do perfectly well—if they cared to make the time. It is, however, more fair to rephrase that last bit as, “if they weren’t so busy working at making enough money so as to be able to afford to fob off so much of the work of living onto professionals that they had time to do this work themselves.”

To be even more fair to the decisions that individuals have to make in our society as it exists today, we are really past the point where an individual can decide on his or her own, or even the adults in a nuclear family can decide on their own, to take on big chunks of the work of living directly, as opposed to fobbing it off on profesionals. People wring their hands over the social consequences of the impending demise of the nuclear family, but if we’re down to the nuclear family, if we’ve already lost the extended family, we’ve already lost the ability to do any of the heavy lifting that tasks as large as caring for our sick elderly at home would require. It takes a village, or at least an extended household.

However, wouldn’t the idea that there is discrimination against care-givers in the formal labor market contradict the idea that non-carers underestimate the effort of caring?

Family members who serve as guardians are notoriously underprepared, and most do, in fact, underestimate the difficulty of taking care of the ward. I’ve done quite a bit of pro bono work in guardianship law (mostly for the guardianship division of probate courts), and there is NO QUESTION that, in general, family members who serve as guardians not only underestimate the burdens of care, but also tend to consistently provide inadequate care. Of course, professional and public guardians aren’t great either, but they’re infinitely more prepared and reliable than family members. Guardianship experts universally acknowledge that family guardians tend to underestimate the burdens of caring for the ward.

Here’s a good empirical study of professional guardians: Reynolds & Carson, Dependent on the kindness of strangers: professional guardians for older adults who lack decisional capacity (1999). It’s not exactly on the topic you need (family members as guardians), but it’s at least a starting place for research in that area.

Sorry for the ramble, but I guess I’m saying I agree with the observation above, that misunderestimation, much as we despise it in our leaders, is a very human attribute. Perhaps for evolutionarily significant reasons.

ObSF: “When the Bough Breaks”, by Padgett