Gendered life-course trajectories of childcare and informal care in the Netherlands

Unpaid caregiving remains highly gendered both in the context of childcare for young children and informal care provided to ill or ageing family members, friends, or neighbors. Using a life-course framework, this study expands previous research which generally treated these care types as separate life domains, by exploring the variety in caregiving trajectories including both childcare and informal care as integral parts of life courses. In addition to identifying and describing clusters of caregiving trajectories, we examine to what extent these are stratified by gender and education. We use unique retrospective survey data on informal caregiving combined with longitudinal data on childrearing, collected by the LISS Panel in the Netherlands (N = 1631). Using sequence and cluster analysis, we created caregiving trajectories covering up to 50 years of individual life courses and identified six clusters of caregiving trajectories that differed in care-heaviness, based on different combinations of the timing, duration, order, and intensity of care episodes. Our findings indicate path-dependency in care patterns, whereby most individuals who have engaged in unpaid care, provided both childcare and informal care at various points throughout their lives. In addition, while patterns of caregiving over the life course did not differ by gender, women were overrepresented in care-heavier clusters while men were more likely to follow the least care-heavy clusters. Theoretical expectations predicting educational differences based on opportunity costs and normative pressure were not supported. Given the anticipated rise in informal care due to population ageing and welfare state retrenchment, our findings suggest that while both women and men will be increasingly confronted with balancing unpaid care with other commitments, the gender gap in care-heaviness might persist and even widen.