Degrees of Care: Gender and Educational Stratification in Caregiving

Elena Maria Pojman , Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research

Gender gaps in multigenerational caregiving are large, and women provide more care than men to family members across much of the life course. However, how education structures gendered caregiving demands remains poorly understood, as educational attainment is typically treated as a control rather than a source of demographic stratification between groups. Pooling data from the 2003-2024 American Time Use Survey, I use logistic and gamma regression models to examine selection into care and conditional time in caregiving at the intersection of gender and education between ages 25-79. I find larger differences in selection than disparities among caregivers. The gender gap is more pronounced among the less-educated than college-educated adults, particularly in selection into care of young children, but college-educated men consistently are more likely to do any care, whereas education restructures women’s care responsibilities after midlife. The age of the care recipient is a clear marker of demographic stratification by gender and education. This study demonstrates how college attainment determines men and women’s caregiving opportunity structure—the temporal and relational context of caregiving—differently, with implications for cumulative disadvantage among less-educated women who face concentrated care demands during critical periods of human capital formation.

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 Presented in Session 104. Flash Session Caregiving Patterns, Determinants and Consequences