Gender and the Tradeoff Model: Paid Work and Intergenerational Care among Older Adults

Natalia Sarkisian, Boston College

Many people faced with demands for eldercare have to decide how to combine caregiving with paid work. Theoretical literature on employment and caregiving suggests that individuals approach this decision as a tradeoff; increases in one of these activities are theorized to lead to reductions in the other. Theoretical literature also suggests that this tradeoff might be particularly pronounced for women. Little research, however, empirically tests these assumptions. This paper uses longitudinal data from the 1931-1941 birth cohort surveyed by the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) biennially between 1992 and 2008 to examine the reciprocal relationship between employment hours and caregiving to parents and parents-in-law. Cross-lagged longitudinal structural equation models show that for this cohort of older adults, the tradeoff model holds for men (with employment hours exhibiting causal predominance), but for women, there appear to be no causal links between employment hours and hours of eldercare.