Women and Unpaid Family Care Work in the EU

Full text

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DIRECTORATE GENERAL FOR INTERNAL POLICIES
POLICY DEPARTMENT C: CITIZENS' RIGHTS AND
CONSTITUTIONAL AFFAIRS
GENDER EQUALITY
Women and unpaid family care work in
the EU
STUDY
PE 419.618 EN
Abstract
This study provides an analysis of the size and value of unpaid family care
work at the European Union level. It proposes a method which relies on
harmonised European surveys. It also compares two EU member States,
Italy and Poland, whose time use data contain additional detailed
information on child care and elderly care work. The study aims at
improving the existing indicators in order to have a reliable quantitative
picture to use in discussions on unpaid family care work at EU level.

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This document was requested by the European Parliament's Committee on Women's Rights
and Gender Equality.
AUTHORS
Fondazione Giacomo Brodolini - Italy
Ms Francesca Francavilla (Policy Studies Institute, UK)
Ms Gianna Claudia Giannelli (University of Florence, Italy)
Ms Gabriela Grotkowska (University of Warsaw, Poland)
Mr Luca Piccoli (Paris School of Economics, France)
Mr Mieczyslaw W. Socha (University of Warsaw, Poland)
SCIENTIFIC COMMITTEE
Ms Francesca Bettio (University of Siena, Italy)
Ms Gianna Claudia Giannelli (University of Florence, Italy)
Ms Janneke Plantenga (University of Utrecht, Holland)
Ms Silvia Sansonetti (Fondazione G. Brodolini, Italy)
Ms Annamaria Simonazzi (Fondazione G. Brodolini and Sapienza University of Rome, Italy)
RESPONSIBLE ADMINISTRATOR
Ms Hélène CALERS
Policy Department Citizens' Rights and Constitutional Affairs
European Parliament
B-1047 Brussels
E-mail: poldep-citizens@europarl.europa.eu
LINGUISTIC VERSIONS
Original: EN
Translation: FR
ABOUT THE EDITOR
To contact the Policy Department or to subscribe to its monthly newsletter please write to:
poldep-citizens@europarl.europa.eu
Manuscript completed in November 2009.
Brussels, © European Parliament, 2009.
This document is available on the Internet at:
http://www.europarl.europa.eu/studies
DISCLAIMER
The opinions expressed in this document are the sole responsibility of the author and do
not necessarily represent the official position of the European Parliament.
Reproduction and translation for non-commercial purposes are authorised, provided the
source is acknowledged and the publisher is given prior notice and sent a copy.

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CONTENTS
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS 7
LIST OF TABLES AND FIGURES 8
Tables 8
Figures 10
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY 12
1. INTRODUCTION 18
2. UNPAID FAMILY CARE WORK IN EUROPE: A REVIEW OF THE
LITERATURE
20
2.1 Introduction 20
2.1.1 EU policy context 21
2.1.2 Unpaid work specific policy context 22
2.2 Unpaid work and the allocation of time in Europe: facts and figures 23
2.3 Review of the literature 26
2.3.1 Domestic work and market work 27
2.3.2 Family child care, market work and child care regimes 29
2.3.3. Family care of the elderly, market work and elderly care regimes 33
2.4 Summary 37
3. SIZE AND VALUE OF UNPAID FAMILY CARE WORK: DEFINITIONS AND
MEASUREMENT METHODS 38
3.1 Introduction 38
3.2 Unpaid Care Work in the System of National Accounts 38
3.2.1 Time use surveys 38
3.2.2 Monetary evaluation: the output and input approaches 38
3.3 Methodological advances and empirical evidence 38
3.4 Summary 38
4. SIZE AND VALUE OF UNPAID FAMILY CARE WORK IN EUROPE: AN
ANALYSIS ON EU-SILC MICRO-DATA AND HETUS 38

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4.1 Introduction 38
4.2 Unpaid domestic work and unpaid family care work in the European Union:
interactions with the labour market. 38
4.3 The value of unpaid domestic work and unpaid family care work in the
European Union 38
4.3.1 Data preparation and methodological description 38
4.3.2 The values of unpaid domestic work and unpaid family care work in the EU
38
4.3.3 Unpaid domestic work and unpaid family care work in the Member States 38
4.4 Summary and conclusions 38
5. IMPROVING MEASUREMENT OF UNPAID FAMILY CARE WORK: A
COMPARATIVE STUDY ON MICRO-DATA FOR ITALY AND POLAND 38
5.1 Introduction 38
5.2 Italy 38
5.2.1 Unpaid family care work in Italy 38
5.2.2 Average size of unpaid family care work in Italy 38
5.2.3 The value of unpaid family care work in Italy 38
5.3 Poland 38
5.3.1 Unpaid family care work in Poland 38
5.3.2 Average size of unpaid family care work in Poland 38
5.3.3 The value of unpaid family care work in Poland 38
5.4 Concluding comparative remarks 38
6. GENERAL CONCLUSIONS 38
REFERENCES 38
ANNEXES 38
A3 Annex to chapter 3 38
A3.1 Definitions of Non-Market Production in the National Accounts (EUROSTAT,
2003) 38
A3.2 Harmonised European Time Use Surveys (HETUS) 38
A3.3 ECHP and EU SILC 38
A4 Annex to Chapter 4 38
A4.1 Data matching 38
A4.2 Computing wages to be used with the opportunity cost approach 38
A4.3 Computing wages to be used with the generalist market replacement
approach 38
A4.4 Computing wages for the specialist market replacement approach 38
A4.5 Computing wages for outsourced child care estimation 38
A.4.6 Wage estimation for potential workers 38
A5 Annex to Chapter 5 38

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A5.1 Description of Italian time use and EU SILC surveys 38
A5.2 Statistical Matching for Italian data sets 38
A5.3 Description of Polish time use and EU SILC surveys 38

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LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS
BHPS British Household Panel Survey
ECHP European Community Household Panel
EGGSIE Expert Group on Gender, Social Inclusion and Employment
EUROSTAT European Statistics Bureau
EU-SILC European Statistics on Income and Living Conditions
GDP Gross Domestic Product
HETUS Harmonised European Time Use Survey
HHSA Household Satellite Account
IHLS/ILFI Italian Household Longitudinal Survey
ILO
International Labour Organisation
ISCED International Standard Classification of Education
ISCO International Standard Classification of Occupations
ISTAT Italian Statistics Bureau
NA National Accounts
SAUCW Satellite Accounts on Unpaid Care Work
SHARE Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe
SNA System of National Accounts
UFCW Unpaid Family Care Work

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LIST OF TABLES AND FIGURES
Tables
Table 1A Mean minutes per day by activity. Males and females aged 20 to 74, EU………………………….21
Table 1B Gender gaps in minutes of work, EU.......................................................................... 25
Table 2 Description of the approaches to evaluate unpaid work.................................................. 38
Table 3 Research reporting domestic work time regressions, by purpose ..................................... 38
Table 4 Women working less than 30 hours because of domestic work by reasons of this choice in the
European Countries...................................................................................................... 38
Table 5 Values of unpaid domestic work and unpaid family care work in the EU (in billions of Euros, %
of GDP in brackets) ...................................................................................................... 38
Table 6 Unpaid domestic work in EU Member States in 2006 ..................................................... 38
Table 7 Unpaid family care work in EU Member States in 2006 (in billions of Euros; source of GDP
values: Eurostat 2006) ................................................................................................. 38
Table 8 Participation and average minutes per day spent in primary activities; by day of the week and
gender (people aged 18-74) - Italy................................................................................. 38
Table 9 Participation (%) in child and adult care (primary and secondary) by gender, age groups and
work status (people aged 18-74) - Italy .......................................................................... 38
Table 10 Mean minutes per day of child and adult care (primary and secondary) by gender, age
groups, and work status (people aged 18-74 years) - Italy ................................................ 38
Table 11 Average minutes per day of primary child care, by type of child care, gender, age group and
work status (people aged 18-74 years) - Italy.................................................................. 38
Table 12 Average minutes of primary adult care, by type of adult care, gender and work status
(people aged 18-74 years) - Italy................................................................................... 38
Table 13 Participation rates (%) and average minutes per day in child and adult care, by gender and
work status (population aged 18-74) - Italy..................................................................... 38
Table 14 Estimated value of unpaid family care work with the opportunity cost approach (reference
population: age 18-74; billions of Euros) - Italy................................................................ 38
Table 15 Estimated value of unpaid family care work with the generalist market replacement
approach (reference population: age 18-74; billions of Euros) - Italy................................... 38
Table 16: Estimated value of unpaid family care work with the specialist market replacement
approach (reference population: age 18-74) - Italy........................................................... 38
Table 17 Participation (%) and average minutes per day spent in primary activities, by day of the
week and gender (people aged 18-74) - Poland................................................................ 38
Table 18 Participation (%) in child and adult care (primary and secondary) by gender, age groups and
work status (people aged 18-74) - Poland ....................................................................... 38
Table 19 Average minutes per day of child and adult care (primary and secondary) by gender, age
groups, and work status (people aged 18-74 years) - Poland ............................................. 38

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Table 20 Average minutes per day of primary child care, by type of child care, gender, age group and
work status (people aged 18-74 years) - Poland............................................................... 38
Table 21 Average minutes of primary adult care, population aged 18-74, by type of adult care, gender
and work status (people aged 18-74 years) - Poland......................................................... 38
Table 22 Participation rates (%) and average minutes per day in child and adult care, by gender and
work status of the population aged 18-74. Poland............................................................. 38
Table 23 Estimated Value of unpaid family care work with the opportunity cost approach (reference
population: age 18-74; billions of Euros) - Poland............................................................. 38
Table 24 Estimated value of unpaid family care work with the generalist market replacement
approach (reference population: age 18-74; billions of Euros) - Poland................................ 38
Table 25 Estimated value of unpaid family care work with the specialist market replacement approach
(reference population: age 18-74) - Poland ..................................................................... 38

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FIGURES
Figure 1 Difference between total work of women and men (20-74) in the EU. Mean minutes per day.
................................................................................................................................. 24
Figure 2 Different categories of time use in the EU (minutes per day), males and females aged 20-74.
(Source: HETUS) ......................................................................................................... 38
Figure 3 Distribution of time in the EU by household income quintiles, males and females aged 20-74
(source: HETUS).......................................................................................................... 38
Figure 4 Distribution of time in the EU by employment status, males and females aged 20-74
(Source: HETUS) ......................................................................................................... 38
Figure 5 Observed and Imputed potential wages for men and women ......................................... 38
Figure 6 Member States’ contribution to unpaid family care work in the EU.................................. 38
Figure 7 Estimated value of unpaid family care work in the EU. Billions of Euros - Italy.................. 38
Figure 8 Estimated value of unpaid family care work in Billions of Euros - Poland.......................... 38

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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Aim of the study. The aim of this study is to provide a methodology to analyse the size
and value of unpaid family care work in Europe. The first objective is an analysis of unpaid
family care work at the EU level conducted on harmonised European surveys. The second
objective is a comparison between two EU Member States, Italy and Poland, whose time
use data contain additional detailed information on child and adult care. Both objectives
aim at improving the indicators on unpaid family care work in order to have a reliable
quantitative picture to use in discussions on this issue.
Definition of unpaid family care work. Unpaid family care work is defined as those
caring activities mainly provided without any monetary return by members of a household
to children and adults of the same household or to relatives living outside the household. A
care activity is defined as productive if it can be delegated to another person. This is the
so-called “third party” criterion.
Motives for studying unpaid work. There are several reasons for studying unpaid family
care work, each one connected to policy issues. The most relevant for the present study
are:
 interrelation with labour market work, especially important for women. Women’s
participation in the labour market is related to domestic work, fertility choices, child
care and elderly care tasks. The policy relevance of this aspect is, needless to say,
enormous, ranging from labour market policies, to policies regarding the public
provision of care services;
 measuring its contribution to GDP and answering questions like what reality would
look like if unpaid domestic work was included in national accounts, what this would
imply for economic growth and income distribution, whether women’s economic
position would be strengthened;
 tracking gender inequalities arising from the unequal sharing of domestic/family
care tasks between women and men.
Background questions of this study. In presenting facts and figures and reviewing the
literature, the background questions of the study are:
 does unpaid family care work have a discouraging effect on participation in the labour
market?
 What are the channels through which this effect takes place, and in which countries?
 What is the relation of unpaid family care work with the level of education,
occupational segregation, gender discrimination, and lack of resources for reconciling
work with family life?
Facts and figures. A general quantitative description of the phenomenon has shown that
in the EU countries:
 time devoted to domestic work plus time spent in child care exceeds, on average,
time spent in the labour market;
 domestic work, child care work and elderly care work are predominantly performed
by women;
 gender gaps in domestic work, defined as the difference between mean male and
female minutes per day spent in this activity, decrease as education increases;
 time spent in child care work increases with education for both males and females;

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 gender gaps in child care increase with the level of education. This is due to the
more than proportional increase with the level of education of child care performed
by women with respect to men.
Literature review. The review of the literature has been structured to cover all
components of household work: domestic work, child care and elderly care work.
Domestic work
 Domestic work continues to be predominantly carried out by women.
 Although different patterns can be seen across some identified groups of countries,
the division of domestic work does not seem to change much over time.
 Although gender gaps are persistent, where women have their own labour income,
more equal sharing of domestic work between men and women seems to occur.
 Some studies suggest that domestic work has a negative impact on female wages
through the reduced accumulation of skills for the market.
Child care
 Unpaid family child care is mainly a woman’s task all over Europe.
 It negatively affects both the decision to participate in the labour force and the
number of hours of work supplied by women.
 Child care welfare regimes in their variegated forms ease both the decision to work
and the decision about how many hours of work to supply.
 Differences in participation and fertility rates for women from different European
countries can be attributed both to household/individual characteristics and to
institutions.
 Education has a prominent role: it increases the probability of paid work, but also
the number of hours parents spend with children.
 Childcare and optional parental leaves have a larger impact on the fertility and
participation decisions of women at lower educational levels.
 Part-time opportunities (when well-paid and protected) have a larger impact on the
outcomes of women with higher educational levels.
 The Nordic countries show the lowest gender gaps in child care and a mix of policies
that eases both parental work and family child care.
 Women in the Mediterranean countries still have to bear most of the burden of
domestic work and care of children. Child care arrangements remain the major
instrument enabling women to enter paid employment.
 The Western countries lie in between the Nordic and the Mediterranean situation.
 The new member countries of the EU show a combination of traditional and
innovative features.
Elderly care
 Unpaid family elderly care is mainly the women’s task all over Europe.
 Its relation with participation in the labour market is unclear. Due to the fact that
time dedicated to this kind of care is much less than child care, there is no
unidirectional evidence.
 The effect of different care regimes is also unclear.
 Despite the stark cross-country heterogeneity, the available evidence seems to
suggest the higher effectiveness of formal care with respect to informal care.

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 Informal care is an effective substitute for formal care as long as the needs of the
elderly are low and require an unskilled type of care. In Sweden and the United
Kingdom home care services have been concentrated on the most serious cases.
Germany has invested mostly in family care provided by the State.
 France and the Netherlands have also promoted a greater provision of professional
home care services as part of a new approach designed to combine employment
creation with the greater coverage of social needs.
 Italy stands as an example of what might be the consequences of the absence of
reforms, with a substantial recourse to female migrant workers. This model has
spread across Southern Europe raising complex issues of equity and sustainability
from an employment perspective.
Data and measurement methods
The study exploits the EU level information on unpaid family care work contained in the
European Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC by EUROSTAT) for 2006 and
in the Harmonised European Time Use Survey (HETUS, by EUROSTAT, different years for
each country). The data sources for the analysis on Italy are The Multipurpose Time Use
Survey 2003/4 (by the Italian Central Statistical Office) and the cross-section for Italy
drawn from EU-SILC 2006. For Poland, the Polish Time Use Survey for 2003/4 (by the
Polish Central Statistical Office) has been used.
The value of unpaid family care work in a country can be derived with three methods:
 Multiplying the total amount of hours spent in caring activities in a year by the wage
rate of the family care givers. This is the wage the care givers earn in the market if
they also work in the market. If the care givers do not work in the market, this is
the wage they could earn, given their characteristics.
 Multiplying the total amount of hours spent in caring activities in a year by the wage
of a domestic worker.
 Multiplying the total amount of hours spent in caring activities in a year by the wage
of workers performing similar tasks in the market (that is, the wage of a teacher for
teaching, of a public driver for transporting, the wage of a nurse for elderly caring).
Results of the EU level analysis. One of the main tasks of the study has been to devise
a methodology to estimate a monetary value of unpaid domestic work and unpaid family
care work at the EU level. The analysis has been conducted for the EU25 countries (except
Malta), both for comparative reasons and to give some indications of the weight that
unpaid domestic work has in each European economy. Several problems arise with the
available data. The main obstacle to be overcome has been that the European harmonised
income survey (EU-SILC) does not collect time use information, implying the necessity to
integrate it with the European harmonised survey on the use of time (HETUS). As a
consequence, some simplifying assumptions had to be made in order to obtain sensible
estimates. It is for this reason that the value has been estimated following all available
methods of the “input approach”, in order to estimate a range of variation, more than a
precise value. Another problem of these data sources is that they do not contain
information on unpaid family elderly care, so that this part of the analysis had to be limited
to child care.
Value of unpaid family care in the EU as a whole. Applying the described methods and
depending on the methodology used:
 the estimated value of unpaid family domestic work and unpaid family care work
taken together ranges between a minimum of 27.1 per cent and a maximum of 37.0
per cent of EU GDP

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 the estimated value of unpaid family care work ranges between a minimum of 3.9
per cent and a maximum of 5.8 per cent of EU GDP.
These figures may appear large, but the time devoted to domestic work plus the time spent
in child care exceeds, on average, the time spent in the labour market.
Value of unpaid family care at a country level. The study also reports the values of
unpaid family care work at a country level, thus showing the different contributions that
family child care work would give to each economy if included in the national accounts. This
contribution varies from the lowest values found for Latvia, the Czech Republic, Slovakia
and Estonia (2 to 3 per cent) to the highest values found for Poland, Germany, Cyprus, the
Netherlands and the United Kingdom (over 6 per cent). Looking at the role of each Member
State, the results show that the larger an economy is, the bigger is its contribution is to the
overall EU values of unpaid domestic work and unpaid family care work. However, this is
due to the combination of larger populations with higher salaries, not to a higher amount of
time devoted to domestic activities in these countries.
The contribution of women to the value of unpaid family care work is large and in
several countries it is more than two times the contribution of men. This is expected, since
the average time women devote to childcare is two and a half times the time devoted by
men. In this case the gender time gap is too large to be offset by the gender pay gap.
Results of the comparative analysis for Italy and Poland. Regarding the comparison
of the methodology adopted at country level and at EU level, the advantages of the micro-
data analysis conducted on these two countries are that using micro data on time use,
which are not available for all EU countries, it is possible to:
 better identify the population contributing to unpaid family care work (that is, by
age, work status, day of the week, household characteristics),
 know precisely the time devoted to child care and elderly care work. This last
component is particularly important because not only do the data and methods
adopted in Chapter 4 not allow this to be taken into account, but also because, as
seen in Chapter 2, there is growing interest in elderly care and no studies that
estimate its value,
 better identify the value of each unit of unpaid family care work (hourly labour
income) supplied by the population contributing to unpaid family care,
 use more sophisticated techniques to impute labour income to individuals observed
in time use surveys (the so called “matching” of different surveys) in order to derive
more reliable estimates.
The comparison of the use of time in the two countries has shown that Italians
participate somewhat less than Poles in child care, but substantially more in elderly care
(around three times more). This has a demographic explanation, since the Polish population
is younger than the Italian population.
As to the distribution of time of people who perform these activities, there are not
significant differences in time spent in primary child care for both males and females
(around two hours a day on average for females and one hour for males). As to elderly
care, Poles spend around forty per cent less than Italians in this activity. However, since
the average time allocated to elderly care activities is generally much lower than child care
in both countries, there are not large differences in time allocated to total unpaid family
care.

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An important determinant of the total value of care is the value of each unit of care. The
discrepancy in the hourly wages between Italy and Poland represents probably the main
explanation of the difference in the value of unpaid family care work in the two countries.
In fact, in Poland, hourly wages are 20 per cent of hourly wages in Italy.
As a consequence, a mere comparison between the absolute values of unpaid family care
work in Italy and Poland is meaningless not only because of the different population sizes,
but also because the data on labour incomes in the two countries refer to two different
years, 2003 for Poland and 2006 for Italy. Considering these caveats, it is useful to report
the value of unpaid family work obtained with micro-data in percentage of GDP.
The percentage of the unpaid family care work (net of taxation) on GDP is around 6.2 per
cent in Italy and 4.5 per cent in Poland.
Comparison with the results obtained at the EU level. This is problematic in the case
of Poland. The first reason is that income from labour refers to different years, 2006 and
2003 respectively, and in 2004 Poland has become a member of the EU. Average nominal
wages have increased between 2003 and 2006 by 11-12 per cent and the exchange rate
has changed from 4.61 PLN per EURO in 2003/04 to 3.89 in 2006.
The second reason is that in the EU level analysis wages are gross (EU-SILC provides them
gross of labour taxes), while in the two-country analysis for Italy and Poland wages drawn
from the time use survey are net. In a typical Polish labour contract, taxation on labour
ranges from 33 to 37 per cent in the period considered. Considering these caveats, to make
results of the EU level and two-country analysis comparable, it is useful to report the net
value of unpaid family work obtained with micro-data in gross value and compute the
percentage of GDP. In terms of GDP, elderly care is around 0.3 per cent and child care is
around 6 per cent. Since the figure for child care estimated at EU level is 8.5 per cent, the
analysis at the EU level overestimates the value of unpaid family child care work for Poland.
For Italy, the comparison is less problematic, since data on income are drawn from the
same source. The estimates in Euros differ by around ten billions (69.5 vs 81). Moreover,
the analysis at the EU level has not allowed taking elderly care into account. Once elderly
care is included, the value of family care work increases by around 23 billion Euros. In
terms of GDP, child care (net of labour taxation) is around 4.7 per cent and elderly care
around 1.5 per cent. The net value of child care on GDP estimated in Chapter 4 is equal to
5.5 per cent. Given the higher precision of the estimated values with micro data, it may be
concluded that the analysis at the EU level overestimates the total value of unpaid family
child care in Italy.
Care of the elderly in the value of unpaid family work. Data and methods adopted in
this analysis have taken into account the weight of elderly care in the value of unpaid
family work. This is particularly important in ageing societies. In fact, family elderly care is
quite relevant in Italy, a country with a relatively old population compared to the rest of
Europe. In Poland, elderly care turns out to be less prominent, also because of the younger
population. Since the two countries are quite similar in terms of family care the estimated
value of unpaid family elderly care should represent two similar regimes at different stages
of ageing. This means that in perspective, all EU countries should place more attention on
collecting data on elderly care, both paid and unpaid.
Assessment on the validity of the EU level analysis. Taking for granted that estimates
on micro data are more precise, the comparison with results obtained with the micro-data

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analysis has shown that the EU level estimated value of child care is not so far from the
value obtained here for the two countries studied, for Italy in particular. It might then be
inferred, keeping in mind all caveats, that the EU level technique might be adopted with a
certain degree of confidence. The allocation of time is a structural phenomenon, exhibiting
very slow changes. For this reason, even if the time use surveys employed in the
estimation refer to different years across countries, this should not represent a problem.
The main element of variability is introduced by monetary values, like labour incomes.
Using income surveys of the same year is, under this respect, fundamental for the country
comparisons at a point in time, since many countries, like Poland, have experienced
substantial economic growth rates, rapid changes in wages and in exchange rates,
especially in the process of entering the EU.

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1. INTRODUCTION
Unpaid family care work accounts for a large share of a population’s effort to survive, to
reproduce and to increase its well-being. Many individuals spend a significant part of their
time in performing care activities, sometimes by their own choice and sometimes because
they cannot afford to buy similar services in the market, or because these services are
rationed or not adequately provided by the State. It is therefore important to have a clear
representation of their amount relative to all other activities performed in a society.
Once this amount is known, certain questions must be addressed regarding the value to be
attributed to these activities, a problem which is important in at least two ways. First,
knowing the value of unpaid family care work would help to make this work “economically”
visible, giving an economic evaluation of the work performed by family caregivers which
could be compared to the value of market activities. This would be particularly important
for gender equality, since family care is still predominantly provided by women. Second, it
would enable cost-benefit analysis to be employed so as to choose the most efficient and
least costly way to provide them. For example, it would help in deciding what is the best
strategy for supplying unpaid family care work, either through the market, the State, or a
combination of these; or whether it is better that households take the burden of it, and, if
so, if household’s income should be adequately supported by the State.
As a result, many questions arise when discussing unpaid family care work, for example to
what extent it should become visible through the market, to what extent it represents an
obstacle to women’s access to the labour market, or to what extent it should be guaranteed
to children or elderly people to improve their well-being. Whatever the question posed, one
of the main problems concerns the methodology that should be applied to measure it.
However, neither the magnitude nor the value of unpaid family care work is easy to
measure. For the magnitude the only satisfactory tools for measurement are represented
by national surveys on how people allocate time between different activities. These surveys
on the use of time are complex and costly but, by now, widely available and comparable
between many different countries. As to its value, this is a more difficult task to
accomplish, since these activities very often have no market price (for example if they are
exclusively provided by the State) and if they do have one it is difficult to attribute the
same price to a service found in the market to a similar caring activity provided by
members of a household to other members. However, economists, and social scientists in
general, have recently made significant improvements in developing well funded
methodologies to solve these problems.
The aim of this study is to provide a methodology to analyse the magnitude and value of
unpaid family care work at the EU level. The first objective is an analysis of unpaid family
care work at the EU level conducted on harmonised European surveys. The second
objective is a comparison between two EU member States, Italy and Poland, whose surveys
contain information on child care and elderly care work which is more detailed than what is
contained in the harmonised European surveys. Both objectives aim at improving the
indicators on unpaid family care work to obtain a reliable quantitative picture to use in
discussions on this issue. As to data sources, the study uses the EU level information on
unpaid family care work contained in the European Statistics on Income and Living
Conditions (EU-SILC by EUROSTAT) for 2006, and in the Harmonised European Time Use
Survey (HETUS, by EUROSTAT, different years for each country). The data sources for the

19
analysis on Italy are The Multipurpose Time Use Survey 2003/4 (by the Italian Central
Statistical Office) and the cross-section for Italy drawn from EU-SILC 2006. For Poland, the
Polish Time Use Survey for 2003/4 (by the Polish Central Statistical Office) has been used.
The literature related to unpaid family care work has a long tradition, starting in the 60s
with the attempts of economists to include household production and family care work in
the national accounts for domestic product. Before presenting the measurement method
and its results, this study adds to the literature review, providing a systematic account of
the rich harvest of recent contributions on topics related to unpaid family care work and the
methods used to measure it.
Plan of the study
After the introductory remarks of Chapter 1, Chapter 2 touches on some aspects related
to the European debate on unpaid family care work, distinguishing the general from the
specific policy context. Section 2.1 introduces the aim of the study, a general definition and
the motives for studying unpaid work. Section 2.2 offers a quantitative description of the
distribution of time in the various activities in the EU countries. Section 2.3 reviews the
literature related to unpaid family care work, distinguishing between its various
components (domestic work, child care, elderly care). Section 2.4 summarises the
discussion.
Chapter 3 reviews the definitions, the data and the existing methods for measuring unpaid
work. Section 3.2 reviews the methodology for the Household Satellite Accounts that
exploits the availability of time use surveys to estimate the value of “extended production”
or “extended income”. Section 3.3 reviews the methods and results, achieved in the
literature, that combine the advances in the accountancy techniques with the achievements
of household economics by means of the econometric approach for imputing values to
unpaid work. This prepares the ground for understanding the methodology applied to the
selected data sources, whose procedures and results are presented in the following two
chapters.
Chapter 4 adds, in Section 4.2, some supplementary description of the use of time in
Europe. The focus is on the EU as a unique entity, using aggregate data. It also provides
some evidence, drawn from EU-SILC, to deal with the paid/unpaid work connections
discussed in Chapter 2. Section 4.3 deals with the main task of the chapter, namely,
estimating and presenting the values of UPW and unpaid family care work through the
integration of HETUS and EU-SILC. Section 4.4 concludes, summarising the most significant
results and suggesting necessary improvements in data collection for conducting a more
robust analysis at the EU level.
Chapter 5 assesses the quality of the results obtained from the proposed method of
analysis focusing on Italy and Poland and using time use micro data. It also evaluates the
potential informative gain with respect to the analysis conducted on the EU surveys.
Section 5.2 reports the analysis and the results for Italy, Section 5.3 reports the analysis
and the results for Poland, and Section 5.4 compares the analysis for the two countries and
assesses the consistency of the results with those obtained at the EU level in Chapter 4.
Chapter 6 provides some general conclusions and contains some suggestions for
improving the design of existing surveys at EU level.
A list of References ends the study, followed by some Annexes that resume the most
technical aspects of the analysis.

20
2. UNPAID FAMILY CARE WORK IN EUROPE: A REVIEW OF
THE LITERATURE
2.1 Introduction
As it is such an essential human activity, a large body of literature in the social sciences has
tried to analyse unpaid family care work both theoretically and empirically. For some
scholars conducting research in the area of gender and work, a central concern involves
measuring and assigning value to unpaid informal care, and highlighting the sex/gender
divisions that exist when it comes to who performs such types of work. Only when
adequate tools are created to measure and value unpaid informal care, a better
understanding will be available of how the social and economic costs of sustaining
households relate to individuals' capacity to participate in the labour force.
General definition. Social scientists often classify unpaid work in the household as
“informal”, to indicate that set of unregulated activities whose inputs are basically the
caregivers’ own time. Informal care is thus distinguished from “formal care”, that is, that
set of activities regulated by law or by contract and that have time-off, money and market
services as inputs. Unpaid family care encompasses care and assistance provided by
members of a household to other members. This work is similar in character to paid care
occupations, such as those related to childcare provision, nursing, and care of the elderly,
which often are among the lowest paid occupations in the labour force. The majority of
unpaid family caregivers are women, and the recipients of care are usually children, elders,
and disabled members.
Motives for studying unpaid work. There are several motives for studying unpaid work,
each one connected to policy issues. We mention the four of them which are the most
relevant for the present study.
First, its interrelation with labour market work, especially important for women. In this
field, the economic literature is very rich, with different approaches, ranging from the
neoclassical household economics started by Becker (1965), to the bargaining approach
(Lundberg, 2008), and to the feminist approach to the economics of the family (Folbre,
2008). The issue of women’s participation is studied in the framework of the theory of
allocation of time, thus involving the analysis of its interaction with domestic production,
child care tasks, fertility choices and so on (Del Boca and Vuri, 2007; Cigno 2008). The
policy relevance of this aspect is, needless to say, enormous, ranging from labour market
policies to policies regarding the public provision of care services.
Second, measuring the contribution of unpaid work to GDP. This motive has led to the
development of methods for “gender budgeting” with the aim of building satellite accounts
to be incorporated in the System of National Accounts (Chadeau 1999, EUROSTAT 2000,
2003). The aim of this methodology is to answer questions like what reality would look like
if unpaid domestic work were measured, valued and included in national accounts, what
alternative estimations of economic growth and income distribution would imply, whether
women’s economic position would be strengthened (Nyberg, 2000).

21
Third, choosing the optimal mix of public and private resources for financing care in a
welfare system. Some studies have concentrated on child care regimes in Europe (Bettio
and Plantenga, 2008, Bettio and Plantenga 2004; Ray, Gornick and Schmitt, 2008), other
studies on elderly care and equity and efficiency in home based care (Bettio and Solinas,
2009; Bettio, Simonazzi and Villa, 2006; Simonazzi, 2008).
Fourth, tracking gender inequalities arising from the unequal sharing of domestic/family
care task between women and men (Aliaga, 2006), and promoting a gender-oriented
budget in the field of fiscal policy.
Content of this chapter. The rest of this introduction touches on some aspects related to
the European debate on unpaid family care work, distinguishing the general from the
specific policy context. Section 2.2 offers a general quantitative description of the
distribution of time in the various activities in the European countries. Section 2.3 reviews
the literature related to unpaid family care work, distinguishing between its various
components (domestic work, child care, care of the elderly). Section 2.4 summarises the
discussion.
2.1.1 EU policy context
The discussion about the role of unpaid family care work has been growing substantially
over the past decade at the European level. This is documented by several reports of the
European Commission like those produced by the Expert Group on Gender, Social Inclusion
and Employment (EGGSIE) on “Making Work Pay” (2005a), the “Reconciliation of work and
private life” (2005b) and the Report on equality between women and men 2008 by the
Directorate General “Employment, Social Affairs and Equal Opportunities” of the European
Commission (2008).
Policy reforms to social protection systems and of related labour market programmes. The
report “Making Work Pay” (2005a) surveys the policy reforms to social protection systems
and of related labour market programmes which have been designed to integrate low-
income groups into employment. This report discusses whether gender mainstreaming of
the policy has occurred, and what gender impact these reforms were expected to have. In
particular, it focuses on the wider incentives and barriers that are faced by those – still
largely women – who take on the primary care role in households with young children, with
a particular emphasis on the situation of mothers in low-income households (tax and
benefits, active labour market policies, childcare, and so on).
Policies targeted towards the reconciliation of work and family life. The report
“Reconciliation of work and private life” (2005b) contains an overview of policies targeted
towards the reconciliation agenda of the 25 EU Member States. Reconciliation policies can
be defined as policies that directly support the combination of work, family and private life.
These include policies on childcare services, leave facilities, flexible working arrangements,
and other reconciliation policies such as financial allowances for working parents. The
report highlights the need to raise participation in the labour market and to stimulate
population growth. An important issue for the coming years seems to be the streamlining of
work and family policies into one integrated system of care, education and leisure services.
Fragmentation, conflicting time schedules and difficulties in transitions from one service to
another hinder the optimal use of services and constrain the growth of female labour-force
participation.

22
2.1.2 Unpaid work specific policy context
Public policies with respect to unpaid work are of two types (Swiebel, 1999):
Specific or direct policies. These are explicitly aimed at unpaid work. They might include
recognising it or making it more visible; influencing the quantity of unpaid work done in a
society or changing the distribution of unpaid work among different groups in society.
Indirect policies. These are not designed and implemented with a view to affecting unpaid
work as a primary policy objective, but they have implicit effects on unpaid work.
Sometimes influencing unpaid work is included as an explicit secondary objective of a
policy. Mostly, however, socio-economic policies have implicit effects on unpaid work.
Although this study relates to both aspects, the specific policies are our main interest, since
new policy routes should attempt to make this work more visible. First of all this requires a
methodology to measure its value, and this is the objective of the present research
proposal.
One solution for better reconciling work with family responsibilities involves more paid
employment in caring, but the conditions of work and employment in these jobs often leave
much to be desired. Under-evaluation of paid care work goes hand in hand with lack of
recognition of unpaid care work, which is seen as natural and not requiring skills. The
growth of the care sector has provided more jobs for women, as most of this kind of work
is done by women. Care workers are among the most poorly paid and have the highest
turnover rates. Since it comes as the traditional task of women it is not perceived as
requiring skill, but rather as something that comes naturally to women; it is barely
recognised as a profession. Wage rates for child-care workers are even lower than average
female wage rates, thus reinforcing the gender gap in earnings. The move away from public
to private care services in many countries, with the state having more of a managerial than
a providing role, means that women benefit less from the wage margin of public-sector
employment and national wage determination for public-sector workers (Antonopoulos,
2008).
Questions addressed. In presenting facts and figures and reviewing the literature, the
background questions of the study are: 1) Does unpaid family care work have a
discouraging effect on participation, and what are the channels through which this effect
takes place, and in which countries? 2) What is the relation of unpaid family care work with
the level of education, occupational segregation, gender discrimination, and lack of
resources for reconciling work with family life?

23
2.2 Unpaid work and the allocation of time in Europe: facts and
figures
This section1 presents some general evidence regarding the use of time in Europe and
highlighting gender gaps and regional disparities. The first section of Chapter 4 provides
more focused and detailed evidence by employment status, income and hours of market
work. The focus here is on the distribution of time among the main activities by gender and
education in all the countries covered by HETUS.
Table 1A Mean minutes per day by activity. Males and females aged 20 to 74, EU
Belgium Bulgaria Estonia Finland France
Activity Male Female Male
Female
Male Female
Male Female Male
Female
Market work 212 128 234
172
295
205
246 168 252
152
Domestic work 154 246 168
297
161
276
140 222 137
246
Child care work 12 27 8
24
11
38
14 32 11
33
Total work 378 401 410
493
467
519
400 422 400
431
Leisure 373 324 310
240
324
275
388 348 283
246
Other 690 718 722
709
648
645
653 670 758
762
Total 1441 1443 1442
1442
1439
1439
1441 1440 1441
1439
Germany Italy Latvia Lithuania Poland
Activity Male Female Male
Female
Male Female
Male Female Male
Female
Market work 234 129 287 127 338 234 314 231 264 149
Domestic work 154 252 98 312 126 239 141 267 144 267
Child care work 12 29 13 34 5 24 8 26 16 42
Total work 400 410 398 473 469 497 463 524 424 458
Leisure 374 348 342 271 311 270 310 244 348 296
Other 665 679 700 697 660 672 669 674 666 685
Total 1439 1437 1440 1441 1440 1439 1442 1442 1438
1439
Slovenia
Spain
Sweden
United Kingdom
Activity Male Female Male
Female
Male Female
Male Female
Market work 254 178 291 144 275 191 280 161
Domestic work 164 283 94 278 154 211 145 245
Child care work 14 33 13 36 19 33 15 42
Total work 432 494 398 458 448 435 440 448
Leisure 359 290 343 290 353 332 358 328
Other 652 656 694 690 640 672 643 664
Total 1443 1440 1435 1438 1441 1439 1441 1440
Note: Each country-survey refers to a different year. The time span varies between 1998 and 2005 (see Table
A3.1 ) Source: Harmonised European Time Use Survey
Table 1A confirms the evidence on gender gaps, with men working more for the market and
engaging less in domestic tasks in all countries. The amount of total work, both domestic
and for the market, is in general higher for females, as highlighted by existing differences
between total work hours for women and men (see Figure 1).
1 This section presents data drawn from the Harmonised European Time Use Survey (HETUS) database and table
generating tool, but the interpretation of it and other views expressed in this text are those of the author. This
text does not necessarily represent the views of the team behind the HETUS database or any national statistical
institute which has contributed data to the HETUS database. The author bears full responsibility for all errors and
omissions in the interpretation of the output of the HETUS database and table generating tool.

24
Figure 1 Difference between total work of women and men (20-74) in the EU. Mean
minutes per day.
‐20
0
20
40
60
80
100
BG IT SI LT ES EE PL FR LV BE FI DE UK SE
Source: our calculations on HETUS. Each country survey refers to a different year. The time span varies
between 1998 and 2005 (see Table A3.1)
Positive differences are due to women’s excess of domestic and child care work. Negative
differences are due to the excess of men’s market work and a more equal division of
domestic tasks. The distinction by country shows that the distribution by gender of
undistinguished total work is more equal in Germany, the United Kingdom, Norway and
Sweden (less than 20 minutes) and more unequal in Bulgaria and Italy (more than 60
minutes). Italian women are the ones who spend the highest amount of time in domestic
activities, the United Kingdom and Poland show the highest amount of time spent in child
care, whereas Bulgaria and Latvia show the lowest. In line with what is known about
women’s participation and employment in Western European countries, the highest share of
time spent in market work is to be found in the Nordic countries and the lowest in the
Mediterranean countries. The more recent Member States, like those in the Balkans and the
Baltic countries, show the highest share of female market work in absolute terms.
As to the role of education, a great number of studies in the literature on human capital
formation and labour give evidence of a significant positive relation between labour supply
and the level of education through its effects on earnings (see e.g. the seminal study by
Mincer and Polachek, 1974). Although there is relatively less evidence about the relation
between domestic work/child care and education, the available studies seem to indicate a
negative relation between education and domestic work and a positive relation with child
care work (see on domestic work e.g. Addabbo and Caiumi, 2003; for the positive relation
between education and child care see Folbre, 2007; Chalasani, 2007; Guryan et al., 2008)2.
2 See, on this subject, also the literature on the relation between parental education and the quality of child care
(e.g. Blau, F. and A. J. Grossberg, 1990).

25
Table 1B focuses on gender gaps defined as the differences between mean male and female
minutes per day spent in each activity by level of education. Gender gaps in market and
domestic work tend to decrease in all countries as education increases, with only one
exception (Slovenia, in market work, but by only a few minutes).
Table 1B Gender gaps in minutes of work, EU.
Male minus female mean minutes per day by level of education and tendency of gender gaps from low
to high education
Bulgaria Estonia Finland France Germany
Work/Education Low High Low High Low High Low High Low High
Market work 62 46 119 73 121 76 121 63 115 88
Domestic work -151 -97 -156 -84 -103 -58 -132 -67 -131 -89
Child care work -16 -22 -20 -16 -26 -28 -19 -19 -4 -19
Total work -105 -73 -57 -27 -8 -10 -30 -23 -20 -20
Tendency of gender gap as education increases:
Total work - - - - -
domestic work - - - - -
child care work + - + 0 +
Total work - - + - 0
Italy Latvia Lithuania Poland
Work/Education Low High Low High Low High Low High
Market work 192 145 113 97 101 74 120 77
Domestic work -249 -143 -137 -80 -152 -96 -126 -74
Child care work -26 -25 -14 -18 -14 -19 -29 -24
Total work -83 -23 -38 -1 -65 -41 -35 -21
Tendency of gender gap as education increases:
Market work - - - -
Domestic work - - - -
Child care work - + + -
Total work - - - -
Slovenia Spain Sweden United Kingdom
Work/Education Low High Low High Low High Low High
Market work 39 50 196 70 113 80 154 72
Domestic work -87 -80 -220 -80 -76 -59 -121 -63
Child care work -14 -42 -27 -32 -8 -19 -31 -37
Total work -62 -72 -51 -42 29 2 2 -28
Tendency of gender gap as education increases:
Market work + - - -
Domestic work - - - -
Child care work + + + +
Total work + - - +
Note: High: top level of education (upper secondary or university). Low: middle school (three years of school after
elementary school) or less. For Belgium no information available on education in the time use survey. This table is
built on the basis of the distribution of mean minutes per day by activity and level of education drawn from
HETUS. Source: our calculations on HETUS.

26
Time spent in child care work increases with education for both males and females and in
all countries. At variance with the other activities, gender gaps in child care increase in the
majority of countries, except France where it does not vary, Italy and Poland where it
decreases by a few hours, and Estonia where it shows a drastic decrease. The increase in
gender gap in child care is due to the more than proportional increase with level of
education of child care by women compared to men. This is in line with the literature that
documents evidence of a positive relation between time spent in child care and education.
However, some additional findings reported in the literature are not confirmed, e.g. the
evidence in Chalasani (2007) according to which in the USA this increase is equally
proportional for mothers and fathers. The total-work gender gap, due to the increase in
female market work and male domestic work, decreases as education increases in all
countries except Finland, Germany, Slovenia and the United Kingdom.
2.3 Review of the literature
Any analysis of unpaid work in the family begins from the more general problem of the
allocation of time within the household. In this framework, the use of time of family
members is interdependent. and each individual will specialise in the activity in which
he/she is most productive. It has been recognised, at least since the work of Becker
(1965), that a significant proportion of time not allocated to market labour is spent
producing goods and services within the household. Questions of individual labour supply,
inequality, taxation, household formation and dissolution, and fertility, among others,
require the formulation of models that take account of the multi-person nature of most
households and explicitly incorporate household production.
This initial condition of discrepancies in productivity may be generated by differentials in
human capital and attitudes to gender roles, and might constitute the starting point for
bargaining over the distribution of paid and unpaid work within a couple. If one partner
specialises in unpaid work, her/his human capital declines relative to the more paid-work-
specialised partner, leading to an intensification of work-role differentiation over time.
The recent analyses on these issues, based on the time allocation framework, have
concentrated on investigating the causes of these differentials in initial conditions that tend
to arise and perpetuate over the life cycle.
The literature on the allocation of time aims to understand (i) the causes that generate the
selection of individuals into particular household and paid-unpaid work statuses, (ii) the
relation between changes in these statuses and changes of attitudes to family care
responsibilities, (iii) the role of policy regimes in determining the paid-unpaid work
distribution, (iv) how to make unpaid work visible and measurable, in order to compare its
magnitude and value with that of paid work.
Content of this section. The section is organised in the following sub-sections.
 Section 2.3.1 reviews the literature on the relation between domestic work and
market work. It focuses first on the relation between domestic work and
employment and then on the relation between domestic work and wages.
 Section 2.3.2 reviews the literature on the relation between family child care,
market work and child care regimes. It first reviews the literature on female
participation in the labour market and child care regimes and then focuses on the
time-use literature on parental time spent with children.
 Section 2.3.3 reviews the literature on the relation between family care of the
elderly, market work and elderly care regimes. It first reviews the literature on

27
female participation in the labour market and elderly care regimes and then focuses
on the time-use literature on time spent with parents by adult children.
 Summaries of main findings conclude each sub-section.
The type of data used in the studies reviewed include household living standards surveys
(cross-section and longitudinal) and time-use surveys, both country specific and
harmonised at the European level.
2.3.1 Domestic work and market work
Domestic work and employment
The literature is rich in comparative analyses on the allocation of time between work and
family, with a focus on gender differences.
At the European level, using qualitative data drawn from the European Quality of Life
Survey 2003, Voicu and Voicu (2007) conduct a comparative analysis on the gender
division of domestic work within the couple. They concentrate on differences across
countries, finding various patterns across Europe. In the Nordic countries, couples spend a
relatively restricted amount of time on housework, sharing it quite equally. In the Southern
countries, as well as in Ireland and the United Kingdom, wives daily spend plenty of time
on domestic chores, while men tend to avoid such activities. In most of the ex-communist
countries, both spouses spend many hours, daily, on housework. In the Western-Central
Europe, the daily housework load is higher than in Scandinavia but lower than in the
Eastern and Southern countries. However, most of the Western couples involve men less
often in housework than the Nordic and ex-communist countries, and they display higher
gender inequalities.
A study by Solera (2008) compares Italy and the United Kingdom using event history data
(British Household Panel Survey, BHPS, and Italian Household Longitudinal Survey, ILFI)
and methods to investigate changes across cohorts in the effect of family responsibilities on
women’s transitions in and out of paid work. The effects of marriage and motherhood are
stronger in a liberal welfare regime such as the British one. In Italy, where demand for
labour is relatively low and gender role norms are quite traditional, reconciliation policies
are weak but largely compensated by intergenerational and kinship solidarity, fewer women
enter paid work, but when they do so they interrupt less than the British women on
becoming wives or mothers.
Overall, it seems that the division of domestic labour does not change much over time.
Breen and Cooke (2005) ask why the gendered division of domestic labour has proved so
resistant to change despite the growth in married women's labour-force participation. Using
data for 22 countries from the 1994 International Social Survey Programme they show that
what is required is that there be a greater proportion of economically autonomous women
within the society as a whole, together with a sufficiently large proportion of men who, if
faced with an economically autonomous woman, would rather participate in domestic tasks
than endure marital breakdown.
To appreciate the perception of the burden of domestic work within the couple, Davis and
Greenstein (2004) use data from the International Social Justice Project in which the
division of household work was measured by asking each partner who usually did the
housework. Like Breen and Coke (2005), they find significant national differences in the
division of domestic work: in nations where women are more employed in the market, like
Russia, women are more likely to report that husbands perform at least half of the
household work.

28
Turning to studies that use time-use data, Anxo et al. (2007) study gender differences in
the allocation of time between market work, domestic work and leisure, conducting a
comparative analysis of Italy, France, Sweden and the United States. They first define four
typologies of households that follow the life-course of an individual biography, that is,
single and childless young people, childless couples, couples with resident children, older
couples or singles without children living at home. Their results show that “the greatest
“revolution” in the time that individuals spend in unpaid work remains related to the
presence of children, especially the youngest (under 6 years old). When they become
mothers, Italian women are those whose domestic time increases most in absolute terms
(more than 22 hours on average per week) followed by American women (more than 18
hours on average per week), all other things being equal. French and Swedish women
increase it by about 16 hours. As children grow up, women reduce the time devoted to
unpaid work, but when children are teenagers or young adults (16-25) they still spend from
5 hours more per week (in Sweden) to 13 hours more (in Italy) in unpaid work than
cohabiting women without children” (p.15). After the peak of the child-care period,
domestic work tends to decrease for both females and males, and starts increasing again
slightly after retirement for both females and males. The positive gender differential is
always present, showing its largest value in Italy and its lowest value in Sweden.
Burda et al. (2007) make a further distinction in total time: they divide total time into
market work, household production (those activities substituting market goods and services
for one’s own time), “tertiary activities” (“those things that we cannot pay other people to
do for us, but must do ourselves, like eating and sleeping”) and leisure. They define total
work as the sum of time spent in market work and household production (p. 2). They find
that in Germany, the Netherlands and the U.S. among people of the same level of
education there is essentially no difference by gender in total work. Men work more in the
market, women engage in more home production, but these balance out. The only
exception is Italy, where men work substantially less in total than women, mainly because
women engage in much more household production than women elsewhere, while men
engage in less. The authors explain this regularity with the theory of social norms,
according to which within education and within region gender differences should be smaller
than inter-group differences.
Domestic work and wages
The allocation of time has also a central role in explaining gender wage differentials. The
gender pay gap in full time work is a worldwide fact, and the difference increases when
part-time work is included. In Europe, although the gap has closed considerably since the
1970s, convergence has slowed in recent years, with little change since the mid-1990s. To
account for this gap, labour economics has focused on gender differences in skills, human
capital and job characteristics. An important explanation for women’s lower wages in this
framework is that women have greater household commitments, leading them to interrupt
their careers more frequently than men and invest less in human capital (Mincer and
Polachek, 1974). In this way, household commitments have an indirect impact on the
gender wage gap through differential skills acquisition. Moreover, tiring activities like
domestic work reduce the amount of effort available for market work, resulting in lower
productivity and wages. Bryan and Sevilla Sanz (2008) study this direct impact of domestic
work on wages and find a negative effect of housework on wages in Britain using data from
the British Household Panel Survey (1992-2004). The differential effect across gender and
marital status suggests that the factors behind the relationship between housework and
wages are the type and timing of housework activities as much as the actual time devoted
to housework. Compared to single women, married women specialise in routine housework

29
which is done at times that may interfere with market work. Married men specialise to a
lesser extent and their housework is not done on the margins of the working day. Polavieja
(2008), using the second round of the European Social Survey, shows that the negative
effect of domestic work on hourly earnings persists even after allowing for sex differences
in sex-role attitudes and personal tastes. Bonke et. Al. (2005), like Bryan and Sevilla Sanz
(2008) but using time budget data for Denmark, quantify the effects of timing and
flexibility of housework on earnings of females and males. They find that women are
penalised more than men by the inflexibility of domestic work, since the early closing of
shops and day care institutions has a negative effect on earnings and careers of females
especially at the top end of the distribution.
Summary of main findings on domestic work and market work
According to the main findings of this literature, domestic work continues to be
predominantly carried out by women. Although different patterns can be envisaged across
some identified groups of countries (for example, the Mediterranean, the Nordic, the Baltic
countries) the division of domestic work does not seem to change much over time. Gender
gaps whereby women do significantly more domestic work than men are persistent.
However, where women have their own labour income, more equal sharing of domestic
work between men and women seems to occur.
As to the effects on wages, there is evidence that domestic work has a negative impact on
female wages through the reduced accumulation of skills for the market. This is due not
only to the number of hours of domestic work that limit the time that could be allocated to
market work, but also to the timing and inflexibility during the day.
These findings seem to imply that, without state intervention, the structure of incentives
behind sex-differences in job-allocation, domestic work and earnings could persist even in
the face of changes in sex-role attitudes and personal tastes.
2.3.2 Family child care, market work and child care regimes
The literature on these issues is copious. A lot of work has been done, for example, on the
relation between motherhood and labour market participation of European women on child
care and women’s participation, parental investment in children, fertility and labour market
participation, all of them related to unpaid family care work. This section overviews the
most recent contributions, focusing mainly on the issue of child-care.
Female participation and child care regimes
According to EUROSTAT in the EU25 in 2006, the number of children aged up to
compulsory school age was estimated at around 30 million. Among these children, 26 per
cent of those less than three years old were attending formal childcare, while the
percentage rose to 84 per cent among those from three years old to compulsory school
age. The children not attending formal childcare were cared for by a parent, child minders
or relatives and friends.
The proportion of those attending formal childcare differed significantly among Member
States. For children aged less than three the highest percentages were recorded in
Denmark (73 per cent), the Netherlands (45 per cent) and Sweden (44 per cent), and the
lowest in the Czech Republic and Poland (both 2 per cent). For children aged three to
compulsory school age, the highest proportions were observed in Belgium (98 per cent),
Denmark (96 per cent) and France (94 per cent), and the lowest in Poland (28 per cent),

30
Lithuania (56 per cent) and Malta (57 per cent). For childcare of 30 hours a week or more,
the highest shares in the age group less than three were observed in Denmark (66 per
cent), Portugal (32 per cent) and Sweden (27 per cent).
The evidence documenting at all level of analysis a positive relation between female
participation and child care services in Europe is by now very abundant. Among the most
recent examples, Del Boca et al. (2008, 2009), using data from the European Community
Household Panel (ECHP), explore the impact of social policies and labour market
characteristics on women’s decisions regarding work and childbearing. The two decisions
are modeled jointly and, in addition to personal characteristics, variables related to the
childcare system, parental leave arrangements, family allowances, and labour market
flexibility are included. Their empirical results show that a non-negligible portion of the
differences in participation and fertility rates for women from different European countries
can be attributed to the characteristics of these institutions, and that the environmental
effects vary by educational level. While labour market arrangements, such as part-time
opportunities (when well-paid and protected) have a larger impact on the outcomes of
women with higher educational levels, childcare and optional parental leaves have a larger
impact on the fertility and participation decisions of women at lower educational levels.
Turning to area studies, Lewis et al. (2008), using the European Social Survey 2004/5,
analyse how parents reconcile employment and child-care in Western European member
states, and how much the EU-level policy on enhancing the formal provision of child-care is
consistent with their preferences. They use information on working patterns and
preferences, and on child-care use and preferences regarding the amount of formal
provision. They find that working hours in formal employment remain a very important
dimension of reconciliation practices, with large differences in both patterns and
preferences. There is very little evidence of convergence towards a dual, full-time worker
model family outside the Nordic countries, although the balance between the hours which
men and women spend in paid work is becoming less unequal. Portuguese women express
a strong preference for much more formal child-care; Dutch, German and British women
are relatively satisfied with the amount they have, despite having much less developed
formal provision than the Nordic countries. The authors conclude that, strong preferences
for changes in working hours provide support for the development of policies that include
child-care leaves, entitlements to part-time or flexible patterns of work, as well as formal
child-care. Since countries vary enormously in terms of the nature of the existing policy
package and patterns of adult labour-market participation, respect for parental choices is
increasingly an issue with regard to the gender divisions of unpaid care work and
employment.
Some previous studies reached a different conclusion. Larsen (2004), for example,
examines the work and care strategies chosen by full-time working families with children in
Finland, Italy, Portugal and the UK. The study investigates whether European families in
different countries, facing the same problems of balancing employment and childcare
responsibilities, respond to their situations in similar ways. Using qualitative data from the
SOCCARE project3, the author makes a comparative analysis of couples in similar work and
care situations. Using their working hours as the common denominator, the paper analyses
their daily childcare arrangements and how these are impacted by gender roles, working
3 SOCCARE was a comparative European research project that has studied informal and formal social care
arrangements for young children and older people. It was financed by the European Commission through its
5th Framework Programme, Key Action for Socio-Economic Research. The project included researchers from
five European countries and it was co-ordinated by the Department of Social Policy and Social Work,
University of Tampere. The project started on 1 March 2000 and ended after 42 months.

31
schedules, workplace flexibility, income levels, parents' educational background and
availability of care facilities. At variance with much of the literature reviewed in this
chapter, the paper concludes that European families' work and care strategies have many
similarities and national differences may not be as marked.
The paper by Nicodemo and Waldmann (2009), focusing on the Mediterranean countries,
analyses the connection between the married women's labour force participation, child care
arrangements. and the time that husbands and wives spend taking care of children. They
use the EU-SILC (European Survey on Income and Living Conditions) cross-section 2006
and data from the ECHP (European Community Household Panel) in 2001, because these
two data-sets provide different information about child care and domestic work. The results
show that while the Mediterranean countries have advanced in the integration of women
into the labour market, in most of them women still have to bear the total burden of
domestic work and care of children. They find that child care arrangements are a major
instrument for women to enter in paid employment.
Turning to specific studies that investigate child care regimes, a comparative study on
childcare services based on EU-SILC data (Plantenga and Remery, 2008) assesses the
current state of affairs of formal child care arrangements in Europe. It emerges that the
presence of a child affects female employment rather heavily, especially in the Czech
Republic, Hungary and Slovakia. The total fertility rates are below replacement level in all
EU Member States, but prove to be especially low in countries with low female participation
levels. There is strong evidence that a sufficient supply of childcare services has a positive
impact on participation, the fertility level and social inclusion. Bettio and Plantenga (2008)
suggest two indicators, intensity of informal care and the availability of child services, to be
based on data drawn from ECHP. The informal care intensity index is based on (i) the
number of adults devoting at least two hours per day to caring for children, or elderly or
disabled persons, divided by the number of ‘potential beneficiaries’; (ii) the proportion of
households which do not pay for regular child care services, divided by the total number of
households with children. The highest values for this index are found in Mediterranean
countries (Italy, Greece and Spain), whereas the lowest values are found for Scandinavian
countries (Denmark and Finland; data for Sweden are not available). The availability of
child services index is based on (i) the number of children under the age of three cared for
by formal arrangements over the total number of children of the same age group; (ii)
children between three years old and the mandatory school age cared for by formal
arrangements (outside the family) as a proportion of all children of the same age group;
(iii) the (prevalent) public/private nature of the child care facilities. However, they then do
not find adequate data sources on which to construct the index, and have to rely only on
the coverage rate of formal child care facilities for the youngest children. This index has the
lowest values in the Mediterranean countries and the highest in the Scandinavian countries.
As to the new member countries of the EU, Szelewa and Polakowski (2008) compare
childcare provisions. They take into account two pillars of childcare policy: publicly provided
childcare services and parental leave provisions. In contrast to previous studies, they
provide evidence of cross-country variation of childcare policies within the region. These
differences are systematised by identifying four clusters of childcare policy. These are:
“explicit familialism” (the State pursues some active policies to support the traditional
family model), “implicit familialism” (policies are residual and formally neutral, with the
assumption that family should not be interrupted in its task of educating children), “female
mobilising” (policies support female participation easing the provision of private and public
formal child care to be paid by households, rather than through parental leaves) and
“comprehensive support” (the State pays child care to employed couples). The countries

32
are clustered as follows: the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Slovenia in the explicit
familialism policy model; Estonia and Latvia in the female mobilising type policy; Lithuania
and Hungary pursuing the childcare policies typical of the comprehensive support model;
and finally the childcare policy in Poland resembles characteristics of the implicit familialism
model.
Parental time spent with children
Time spent with children represents a fundamental investment in their development, and
institutions play a crucial role as mediators between the female labour supply and time
devoted to children. Ichino and Sanz-de-Galdeano (2003) have called attention to the role
of child care and working-time arrangements, comparing evidence based on time use data
for three countries: Italy, Germany and Sweden. While in all these countries working
mothers appear to dedicate less time to child care than non-working mothers, in Sweden
the difference between the two groups is the smallest. In Italy maternal work is associated
with the largest loss of maternal child care. To shed light on the possible reasons for this
finding they consider the role of part-time job opportunities and formal or informal child
care arrangements. They argue that while child care facilities increase mothers’ access to
employment, it is the availability of flexible working arrangements that allows them to work
and still have enough time to allocate to child care.
Joesch and Speiss (2006), using data from the 1996 wave of the European Community
Household Panel for mothers with children under 16 years of age, compare how many
hours per week mothers reported looking after children in nine European countries. They
also explore to what extent cross-country differences in socio-demographic characteristics
and parental employment contribute to differences in maternal time spent looking after
children. They find cross-country differences in the mean number of hours mothers
reported looking after children. Only a small portion of these differences is explained by
variation in socio-demographic characteristics and employment status. Country-specific
policies aimed at reconciling parenthood and employment appear to explain some of the
differences.
Cardoso et al. (2008) introduce choices made by children themselves into the analysis of
parental investment in children. They model youngsters’ aged 15 to 19 use of time in
activities not only related to study, but also to social-networking which can enhance
personal interaction skills. Using data on time use for France, Italy and Germany, they
study the link between time allocation by parents and time allocation by youngsters.
Countries diverge with regard to the association between parents’ and youngsters’
allocation of time to socialising and to reading and studying activities, with Italy standing
out as the country where that association, in particular between youngster and mother, is
strongest. Their results are consistent with different mechanisms: parental role models
directly influencing children’s behaviour, intergenerational transmission of preferences, or
network effects as individuals adapt their behaviour to social patterns.
Chalasani (2007) shows, on data drawn from the American Time Use Survey for 1985 to
2003, that better educated parents used to and continue to spend more time with their
children than the less educated. Although parents at all levels of education have increased
their time with children over the years, the better educated have made relatively larger
gains. Further, while mothers spend more time with children than fathers, the ratio of
mothers’ to fathers’ child time was and continues to be lower for the better educated than
the less educated.

33
Summary of main findings on family child care, market work and child care regimes
Parental choices are increasingly an issue with regard to the gender divisions of unpaid care
work and employment. Although countries vary significantly in terms of the nature of the
existing policy package and patterns of adult labour market participation, some regularities
emerge from the literature reviewed. According to the main findings of this literature, child
care work continues to be predominantly carried out by women. Time spent in child care is
negatively related to female participation to the labour market and to the number of hours
women work.
Differences in participation and fertility rates for women from different European countries
can be attributed both to household/individual characteristics and to institutions. Among
the former, one of the most important is the level of education. Education has a prominent
role: it increases the probability of work, but also the number of hours parents spend with
children, with different intensities in different countries. As to the role of institutions,
childcare and optional parental leaves have a larger impact on the fertility and participation
decisions of women at lower educational levels. Labour market arrangements, such as part-
time opportunities (when well-paid and protected) have a larger impact on the outcomes of
women with higher educational levels. These findings lead to the conclusion that, while
child care facilities increase mothers’ access to employment, it is the availability of flexible
working arrangements that allows them to work and still have enough time to allocate to
child care.
The choice of the policy mix of labour market arrangements and formal child care largely
depends on country specificities. The categorisation of countries into groups with similar
characteristics, reveals that the Nordic countries show the lowest gender gaps in child care
and a mix of policies that eases both parental work and family child care. Women in the
Mediterranean countries, instead, even if advancing in terms of integration into the labour
market, still have to bear the total burden of domestic work and care of children. In this
case, child care arrangements remain the major instrument enabling women to enter paid
employment. The Western countries lie between these two extreme situations. As to the
new member countries of the EU, there seems to be quite a lot of variety. The State
pursues some active policies to support the traditional family model in the Czech Republic,
Slovakia and Slovenia; policies are residual and formally neutral in Poland, while in Estonia
and Latvia policies support female participation by easing the provision of private and
public formal child care to be paid by households, rather than through parental leaves; both
active and passive interventions to support women’s work and families are present in
Lithuania and Hungary.
2.3.3. Family care of the elderly, market work and elderly care regimes
Increasing interest in this topic accompanies the growing attention to the welfare
consequences of elderly care provision in ageing societies. The policy question is how to
choose the optimal mix of elderly care services and money transfers to families without
either increasing public spending or producing disincentive employment effects.
Some literature has taken advantage of the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in
Europe (SHARE, 2008), a multidisciplinary and cross-national panel database of micro data
on health, socio-economic status and social and family networks of more than 40,000
individuals aged 50 or over. However, due to the lack of detailed information in many time
use surveys of European Member States, there is no research on time spent with the
elderly based on time use data.

34
This section first reviews the studies on the relation between unpaid family elderly care
work and female employment and then discusses the potential effects on unpaid family
care work of different elderly care regimes in Europe.
Female participation and elderly care regimes
Faced with tight budgets, a recent trend in the EU countries has been to re-direct transfers
from public provision of elderly care to informal care. As shown by Jacobzone and Jenson
(2000, p.4) these benefits represent a compensation for the costs incurred in care giving,
particularly when compared with a situation without benefits. However, they are sometimes
offered at only symbolic levels, and do not appear necessarily to minimise gender-related
inequalities. Their welfare-enhancing effects depend on their level. Their effects on women
care-givers, and in particular on their participation in paid labour market activities, depend
primarily on the level of benefits, as it is this which largely determines the reaction of care-
givers to such benefits. However, the modest rates of benefits mean that they are unlikely
to have been the main determinant of care provision in the majority of cases: care is
provided because of need (and would have been even if no benefits had been paid).
Some other studies show that this expectation of replacement of formal care with informal
care may have turned out to be in conflict with the target set in the European Employment
Strategy for female employment rates in Europe. In fact, some research on the relation
between informal care and labour force participation gives evidence of a negative relation
(for the US, see Ettner, 1996; Kolodinsky and Shirey, 20004). For Great Britain, Henz
(2006), using retrospective family, employment, and caring data from the British Family
and Working Lives Survey 1994 – 1995 for 9,139 British men and women, finds that family
roles but not employment characteristics were relevant for men and women taking up
caring. Being in a lower social class was, however, an important predictor of female carers
leaving the labour market. Starting caring and quitting the labour market because of it
were not affected by women working part time, nor by most aspects of job flexibility that
were considered.
Sarasa (2008), using pooled ECHP data, analyses the effects of old age and disability
benefits on women’s decisions to allocate time to adult care giving. The main conclusions
are the following: (i) non-means-tested provision of benefits lowers the risk of heavy adult
care giving among all women, while means-tested benefits have no significant effect on
poor women’s behaviour, and (ii) providing services is more efficient than cash transfers in
reducing women’s probability of allocating many hours to adult care. Viitanen (2007), using
the same data set but exploiting its panel nature, finds that an increase in government
expenditure on formal residential care and home-help services for the elderly significantly
decreases the probability of providing care to elderly parents living outside to household for
a sample of European women aged 45-59. Contrasting the recent tendency of long-term
care policies, some simulation results in the same paper show that increasing government
expenditure on formal residential and home-help for the elderly can significantly increase
the labour force participation rates of women across Europe.
The SHARE report (SHARE, 2008) provides descriptive evidence of the fraction of people
helping old parents conditional on labour force participation. It emerges that there is stark
cross-country heterogeneity. In Greece, Sweden and Denmark time spent in helping old
parents does not depend on labour force participation, while in many other countries
workers provide significantly less of this type of care than non-workers. Some studies
4 Wolf and Soldo, 1994, however, on the same data as Ettner (1996), do not find evidence of reduced
propensities to be employed, or of reduced conditional hours of work, due to the provision of parental care.

35
based on the SHARE data set provide econometric evidence of the relation between formal
and informal care giving and the effects on women’s choices. For example, Crespo’s (2006)
estimates based on SHARE data show the causal effect of providing “intensive” informal
care to elderly parents on labour market participation decisions of a sample of European
daughters. The estimated probability of participating in the labour market is negatively
affected by care giving for both Northern (Sweden, Denmark and the Netherlands) and
Southern (Spain, Italy and Greece) countries. Moreover, a substantially stronger effect is
found when care-giving and labour market participation are considered as being mutually
dependent: more labour market participation means less care-giving. This shows that the
potential opportunity costs in terms of reduced employment associated with the provision
of informal care by women are seriously underestimated under the simplifying assumption
that the direction of causality is such that more care-giving leads to less participation in the
labour market.
As to the specificities of child care regimes, the need to restrain public spending has, in the
past decade, obliged many European countries to restructure the system of social care. In
this context, the case of long-term elderly care offers an example of reforms that have tried
to rationalise the linkages between paid and unpaid work across key forms of provision.
Pavolini and Ranci (2008), studying the case of six European countries, find that a special
weight has been attached to home care services and measures aimed at supporting family
care. While in Sweden and the United Kingdom home care services have been concentrated
on the most serious cases, the countries of continental Europe have introduced the most
significant innovations, with Germany investing mostly in family care, while France and the
Netherlands also promoted greater provision of professional home care services as part of a
new approach designed to combine employment creation with greater coverage of social
needs. Italy stands as an example of what might be the consequences of the reforms, with
a recourse to female migrant workers to such an extent that the Italian traditional family
model of care is becoming a ‘migrant in the family’ model of care (Bettio, Simonazzi and
Villa, 2006)5.This model stems from the recent experience of replacing unpaid family carers
with low-cost immigrant workers directly employed by the families and often cohabiting
with the elderly. This new model has spread across Southern Europe and raises complex
issues of equity and sustainability from an employment perspective.
A strand of literature tests the hypothesis that informal care given by family members to
the elderly is a substitute for formal care in Europe. Bonsang (2008), for example, focuses
on two types of formal home care that are the most likely to interact with informal care
provided by adult children: paid domestic help and nursing care. Using SHARE data, the
results indicate that informal care substitutes for paid domestic help and that this
substitution effect tends to disappear as the level of disability of the elderly person
increases. In fact, informal care is complementary to nursing care only to a limited extent,
independently of the level of disability. These results highlight the heterogeneous effects of
informal care on formal care use and suggest that informal care is an effective substitute
for long-term care as long as the needs of the elderly are low and require an unskilled type
of care.
Time spent by adult children caring for parents
5 Degiuli (2007), through narratives of workers and the exploration of this 24-hour job, describes what it means
to work as a home eldercare assistant in Italy. On the case of migrant women providing elderly care in Italy see
also Da Roit (2007).

36
This is an area where there is almost no research at the European level, since time-use
surveys are difficult to harmonise on this issue6. However, some national surveys contain
detailed information on this issue, as is the case, to some extent, in the national surveys
for Italy and Poland used in chapter 5 of this study.
Some small-scale studies have documented that when people assume the role of assisting
a person with impairments or an older person, care activities account for a significant
portion of their daily routines. Nevertheless, little research has investigated the problem of
measuring the time that carers spend in care-related activities. Bittman et al. (2005)
contrasts two different measures of care time. One is an estimate of average weekly hours
drawn from a question in the 1998 Australian Survey of Disability, Ageing and Carers. The
other is an estimate drawn from diaries in the 1997 national Australian Time Use Survey.
Their study finds that diaries provide information for a more robust estimate, but only after
one models the time use patterns in the days of carers to identify care-related activities,
which diarists do not necessarily record as care. Such a measure of care time reveals that
even people who offer only occasional assistance to a person with impairments tend to
spend the equivalent of more than 10 minutes a day providing care.
The SHARE survey provides some evidence on the incidence and intensity of elderly care
provided by adult children (see p.197). Germany, Greece and the Czech Republic are the
countries with the highest proportion of children helping. The rate for the Czech Republic, in
particular, is noticeably higher than for the rest of the SHARE countries. This rate is in line
with other surveys run in the same country: a substantial amount of care within the family
is traditionally expected and delivered in this country. Turning to the intensive margin of
help, i.e. to the number of hours spent providing informal care, a clear North-South gap
arises: this is consistent with the sociological literature (see, as an example, Reher, 1998):
family ties are stronger in Mediterranean countries, and they induce adult children to think
about formal care as something to avoid as long as family members are able to help for
their elderly relatives. There is a substantial cross-country heterogeneity and cultural
differences explain part of it, but individual choices are likely to depend on differences in
institutional long term care systems as well.
Summary of main findings on family elderly care, market work and elderly care regimes
As documented by the literature reviewed, a recent trend in the EU countries has been to
re-direct transfers from public provision of elderly care to informal care within families.
The expectation of substitution of formal care with informal care may have turned out to be
in conflict with the target set in the European Employment Strategy for female employment
rates in Europe. In fact, some research on the relation between informal care and labour
force participation gives evidence of a negative relation. However, the effects of these
benefits on female care-givers, and in particular, on their participation in paid labour
market activities, depend primarily on the level of benefits, as it is this which largely
determines the reaction of care-givers to such benefits. However, the modest rates of
benefits mean that they are unlikely to have been the main determinant of the conflict
between care provision and labour market participation of women.
Despite the stark cross-country heterogeneity, the available evidence seems to support the
higher effectiveness, under many respects, of formal care with respect to informal care.
6 Some surveys do not even contain detailed information on this issue. The HETUS data released to the public do
not contain this variable, even if, according to the documentation, the variable “Help to an adult family member”
(var. no. 391) and “Help to an adult of another household” (var. no. 428) are present. See
https://www.testh2.scb.se/tus/tus/doc/Recording_domains.pdf.

37
The increase in government expenditure on formal residential care and home-help services
for the elderly significantly decreases the probability of providing care to elderly parents
living outside the household and increases the labour force participation rates of women
across Europe.
In particular, professional home care services and measures aimed at supporting family
care have been tried in continental Europe and some Nordic countries as part of a new
approach designed to combine employment creation with the greater coverage of social
needs. At variance with these experiments, in some other countries, mostly Mediterranean,
the recent experience is the replacement of unpaid family carers with low-cost immigrant
workers directly employed by the families and often cohabiting with the elderly. This new
model raises complex issues of equity and sustainability from an employment perspective.
One strand of literature tests the hypothesis that informal care of the elderly by family
members is a substitute for formal care in Europe. Two types of formal home care that are
the most likely to interact with informal care provided by adult children emerge: paid
domestic help and nursing care. Using SHARE data, the results indicate that informal care
substitutes for paid domestic help and that this substitution effect tends to disappear as the
elderly person’s level of disability increases. In fact, informal care is complementary to
nursing care only to a limited extent, independently of the level of disability. These results
highlight the heterogeneous effects of informal care on formal care use and suggest that
informal care is an effective substitute for long-term care as long as the needs of the
elderly are low and require an unskilled type of care.
2.4 Summary
In this chapter unpaid family care work has been introduced and placed in context. A
general quantitative description of the phenomenon has shown that in the European
countries:
 domestic work, child care work and elderly care work are predominantly performed by
women;
 gender gaps in domestic work, defined as the difference between mean male and female
minutes per day spent in this activity, decrease as education increases;
 time spent in child care work increases with education for both males and females;