Why Is the Gender Gap in Care Work Wider in Rich Countries?

The world needs more carers. Some countries have aging populations; others, growing populations. In both cases, the demand for care-economy jobs, such as teacher, nurse, or social worker, is on the rise, and expanding at a faster pace than the need for jobs in computing or engineering.

Across countries, these care jobs are consistently dominated by women, while men make up a larger share of STEM fields. At first glance, that suggests that gender-based occupational segregation is a universal fact of life. But upon closer inspection, the gap in these fields can vary widely by country. A newly published study co-authored by Yale SOM’s Adriana Germano, led by Katharina Block of the University of Amsterdam and a large international team including Maria Olsson of Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences,Inland School of Business and Social Sciences, and Toni Schmader of the University of British Columbia, examines this variation to offer a novel and nuanced cross-cultural explanation of occupational segregation.

Occupational segregation is often more pronounced in countries with a high score on measures of gender equality. This is somewhat surprising: one might think that more gender-equal countries would have a more equal balance of women and men across different fields. Scholars have tried to explain this so-called “gender equality paradox” by asking why women in more gender-equal countries appear less likely to pursue STEM degrees.

Block suspected something else might be at work. Rather than focusing on women’s choices in STEM, the researchers examined the opposite side of the equation: why, in more economically developed societies, men are less likely to enter care jobs. They point to two key factors: changes in labor-market structure that accompany development, and cultural individualism—the extent to which a society emphasizes independence over collective obligation.

Consider, first, how different gender segregation looks by the numbers. In a sample of 70 countries, the percentage of women in care economy fields ranged from 43.6% to 90.3%. The share of women in STEM-related fields ranged from a paltry 3.5% to 35.7%.

The key variable in this variation, the researchers found, was economic development. Countries with higher scores on the 2017 Human Development Index (a summary measurement incorporating life expectancy, standard of living, and education) showed larger gender gaps in care jobs, and measures of gender equality did not explain additional variation once development was accounted for—indicating that the apparent “gender-equality paradox” in care professions reflects socio-structural development rather than equality itself.

This is likely because developed countries tend to have larger and more diverse labor markets, larger public sectors (which employ teachers and nurses), and bigger service sectors. Sociologists suggest that many of these care jobs offer flexibility, including part-time work, which can make them easier to combine with family caregiving.

“These more ‘developed’ labor markets create the opportunity for men and women to go into these totally different directions,” explains Block. “When you have more and more jobs opening up in the care economy, given existing gender stereotypes, women sort into these careers, and that reinforces gender stereotypes.” Just the fact of labor-market specialization, in other words, may magnify gender segregation. By contrast, in less-developed economies, women and men might work side-by-side in agriculture or in a small family firm or shop.

To further understand why the care-job gender gap is larger in more developed countries, Block, Germano, and over a hundred other colleagues surveyed university students around the world about their values and career interests. Participants rated the personal importance of three types of values: communal (that is, helping and caring for others), agentic (status and power), and competence (skill and achievement). They also rated their interest in three care-economy jobs (social worker, teacher, and nurse) and three STEM careers (mechanical engineer, electrical engineer, computer programmer). Separately, the researchers incorporated country-level data on cultural individualism from a widely used dataset that scores countries on cultural dimensions.

They found that gender differences in interest in care-economy jobs were associated with gender differences in communal values and with national levels of individualism. These relationships held even after accounting for a country’s level of economic development.

Individualism (which tends to be higher in more economically developed countries) is associated with larger gender gaps in communal values, the authors argue, because men tend to express a culture’s dominant values. So in a country like the U.S., where individualism is a deeply rooted cultural value, men are much less likely to gravitate toward caring jobs. But in countries where a communal or collective ethos is more dominant, “men are comparatively more interested in these more communal jobs,” Germano says. “There are very collectivistic countries where there's also less segregation in the labor market.” She cited the example of Tanzania, a country where interest in care occupations is less sharply divided by gender.

“One of the strengths of looking outside of the U.S., and looking more broadly at what’s going on globally, is that then we can start pinpointing the trends in terms of what’s going on with individualism a bit more clearly and see what’s driving the particular effect,” Germano adds.

Individualism also helps explain an asymmetry in the results: development widens the gender gap in care work, but not in STEM. In cultures that emphasize independence and personal achievement, women may feel freer to enter traditionally male fields, but there is no comparable pull encouraging men to enter care occupations. “That’s where the asymmetry comes in, that women could go into STEM, but men weren’t going the other direction,” Block says.

Their findings push back against the idea that women are just more “naturally” suited for caring roles, and provide a powerful argument for thinking about how women and especially how men are socialized.

“It's not the case that men and women in different countries just have different career interests in a vacuum,” Block says. “In cultures where we value individualism more, men specifically become less and less communal, and that translates into career interests. But there are cultures in which men are very socialized to take another person’s perspective, to show empathy, to cooperate with others, to be communal, and that also translates into their career preferences.”

Bringing together data from so many countries puts a new light on the role of culture, alongside the structural aspect of labor-market specialization. It demonstrates, adds Block, that “no matter how many thousands of studies you do, if you do them in one context, you’re missing the fact that the effects that you’re finding are themselves a cultural phenomenon—one that can be changed.”