• Care

• Spillovers

• Facilitating work life balance

Are the gender gaps in informal caregiving intensity and burden closing due to the COVID‐19 pandemic? Evidence from the Netherlands Helping helpers? The role of monetary transfers in combining unpaid care and paid work Testing the Informal Care Model: Intrapersonal Change in Care Provision Intensity during the First Lockdown of the COVID-19 pandemic The wage penalty for informal caregivers from a life course perspective

The wage penalty for informal caregivers from a life course perspective

Informal caregiving, meaning taking health-related care of an older and/or disabled person in the personal network, often has consequences for paid work. Classically scholars focus on two strategies of informal caregivers to adapt employment: stopping and reducing working hours. Two other, but neglected, plausible strategies may similarly have career consequences, namely changing jobs and becoming self-employed. We first assess the theoretical idea that a work-care conflict is a condition for choosing a work adaption strategy. Second, we theoretically and empirically explore a life course (i.e., timing) and gender perspective on strategies to adapt paid work. We use detailed retrospective data on informal caregiving from the Netherlands, collected within the Longitudinal Internet Studies for the Social sciences (LISS) (N=3,676 caregiving episodes of 2,114 caregivers). Based on multilevel logistic regression models, we find that caregivers who felt that they had difficulties combining work and care, were more likely to choose any strategy. Especially caregivers who started to provide care at the age of 24 or younger were more likely to reduce working hours or change jobs. In the early family formation stage (25-34 years), women were more likely to reduce working hours, while in early middle age (45-54 years) men were more likely to stop working.

We explore to what extent caregivers (a) reduce working hours, (b) stop work, (c) change jobs, and (d) become self-employed if they experience high work-care conflict. We further explore whether the use of these strategies depends on the life stage in which a caregiving situation starts and whether female or male caregivers use different strategies.

• Collected during project

• Questionaire

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Retrospective informal care career - Main measurement

Background variables

• Structured

• Dutch

Netherlands

01/01/2020

31/03/2020

None