The gender gap in caregiver well-being is real. How to fix it

By Elissa Strauss, CNN

(CNN) — Caregiving for an aging parent is not, by design, a simple endeavor.

There’s the mountain of practical matters to attend to, including managing doctors’ appointments, seeking diagnoses, and ensuring Mom or Dad is physically safe.

While you probably feel sad about your parent’s condition or the role reversal in your relationship, stress over time commitments and bank accounts, you may also feel deep meaning, purpose and even joy many find in caring for a loved one.

But men and women do not experience those more positive parts in equal measure when caring for their parents, according to new research from the Pew Research Center.

More women than men are caregivers

In its new report, Pew shared findings on both the prevalence of caregiving in the United States as well as caregiver well-being.

Many people are caregivers. Ten percent of US adults are caring for a parent over age 65, while 3% are caregivers for a spouse or partner 65 or older, the report found. Lower-income adults are more likely to be caregivers than middle- or upper-income adults, and women are more likely to be caregivers than men — 28% of women compared with 23% of men, according to the report. However, that gender gap is shrinking.

But the way men and women experience caregiving is different.

Among male caregivers, 61% report that it has had a positive impact on their relationship with their parents. That number drops to 53% among women.

Women are also more likely to report that caregiving has had a negative impact on their physical health (38% vs. 26%) and a negative effect on their emotional well-being (47% vs. 30%) compared with men.

Men, meanwhile, are more likely to report that caregiving has had a positive impact on their emotional well-being (36% vs. 21%).

Kim Parker, director of social trends research at Pew, told me that these numbers held even when men and women were doing the same tasks. (Personal care, such as bathing and toileting, tend to be more physically and emotionally challenging than managing finances.)

“The only difference we saw is that women are more likely to help aging parents with managing health care. But when it came to other types, including personal care, we didn’t see a significant difference,” said Parker, noting the results surprised her.

A gap in self-expression

So the gap in caregiving well-being can’t be explained by the type of care women and men perform. But it might be explained, in part, by the ways women are encouraged to share their feelings and men are not.

For starters, women are more likely to report stress and anxiety than men in a wide range of studies, a number of experts told me. Doing so might be the result of social conditioning, making women more sensitive to emotional realities and comfortable expressing them — and, inversely, social conditioning making men less sensitive to emotional realities and more uncomfortable expressing them.

“Emotional expression is more OK for women … and this plays out in the outcomes we are looking at,” said Michelle Feng, a geropsychologist and chief clinical officer at Los Angeles-based Executive Mental Health.

Besides sharing their feelings, Feng suspects women are more likely to shift their focus beyond problem-solving and consider the grief inherent in watching parents grow old and witnessing them experiencing physical or mental decline.

Women are more self-critical and criticized

This well-being gender gap is also the result of the different expectations women and men bring into the caregiving relationship, experts said.

Women are generally socialized to be giving and assumed to have an instinct for care by the broader culture. As a result, women are expected to do more than men in the care relationship.

“The social expectations are lopsided,” said Barry Jacobs, a clinical psychologist and coauthor of “The AARP Caregiver Answer Book.” Unfortunately, these heightened expectations placed on women tend to come with less support, acknowledgement and praise than men generally receive, Jacobs said.

Men, on the other hand, experience few or no expectations when it comes to their aptitude for care. They may not enter into care relationships with the sense of internal pressure or perfectionism that women often do.

Jacobs found that to be case in his experience caring for his mom and stepdad. “I was put on a pedestal, called a hero. But I wasn’t a hero by any stretch of the imagination, I was resentful and lost my temper,” he said. “I never hear women being called heroes for caregiving.”

For men, care can be an opportunity

American culture generally socializes men to be competitive, decisive and level-headed. Meanwhile, caregiving requires responsiveness, receptivity and emotion-informed decision-making. It can feel like a welcome break from traditional masculine expectations for many men.

Journalist Brigid Schulte has done extensive research on male caregivers. She’s found that many men yearn to do more caregiving but encounter systemic barriers that get in their way.

They “felt their families didn’t support them, or felt social stigma, or found that public policies did not support them,” said Schulte, director of the Better Life Lab, an organization aimed at improving narratives and policy around work and family at the New America think tank.

Meanwhile, many men reported that they found care deeply meaningful and felt as though “the experience profoundly changed them” for the better, she said.

How to fix the caregiving gap

The gender gap in caregiver well-being is not inevitable.

All caregivers need to seek social support and have the mental space and time to think about how to find meaning in caregiving, experts said. Doing so is a well-known buffer to stress, giving caregivers the capability to weave a sense of purpose and long-term thinking into day-to-day activities.

Jacobs suggests that caregivers think five years into the future and imagine themselves reflecting on this moment. “When people put themselves in the future, they are able to say, ‘This is really hard, but I am glad I did this.’ It helps them see how they are growing through the experience.”

Meanwhile, Jacobs encourages everyone — women in particular — to cut themselves some slack.

“This is a very hard job, and self-criticism never improves caregiver performance. It only makes the whole ordeal difficult,” he said. “But when people are kinder to themselves, give themselves some grace for learning, then they do better and allow themselves to correct the mistakes they made.

“Making a mistake doesn’t make you a bad daughter or wife. It just makes you human.”

Schulte recommends that female caregivers try not to accept all the caregiving work without sharing the burdens.

“Sometimes this starts in a very small place, in your own family, just bringing awareness to how you are feeling and your partner is feeling, where you are feeling unsupported, and what is bringing you joy,” she explained.

Those moments can evolve into big picture conversations about how to share the burdens of care more equitably.

Such conversations might feel like another item on your to-do list. But Jason Resendez, president and CEO of the National Alliance for Caregiving, said that men’s increasing willingness to engage in care creates an opening for productive conversations about the division of labor in households.

It is necessary, he said, because care-related stress and burnout will affect the whole family, no matter who is actively caregiving. Exhausted caregivers might not be able to do their job, care for their children or do housework.

“That care is going to be absorbed by the household one way or another, so you need to talk about it,” Resendez said.

“Care is such a personal intimate thing, but it is also an economic proposition and health-care proposition,” he said. People need to find “a more sustainable way of doing it and mitigate some of the hardships.”

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