For a growing number of women, juggling a career with caring responsibilities is not just a matter of fitting in work around the kids but also in finding the time to look after elderly parents.
I met two women managing this juggle last week. One had moved into her father’s home full time after he suffered from a stroke, while working a couple of days a week for a small accounting firm. The other is commuting between Sydney and her parent’s home in regional NSW. Both have put their careers on hold, having previously taken career breaks to raise children.
They are just two women among a growing number experiencing the caring squeeze, in which they find themselves again managing ‘the juggle’ of balancing work and life, either while still raising children, or after finally seeing their own children reach an age of independence.
And while there seems to be support and a strong acknowledgment of what such caring entails when it involves looking after young children — taking paid parental leave and working flexibly are now entitlements new mums are expected to take — such support structures are not always in place at the other end of the caring spectrum, or even necessarily acknowledged as needed.
As Carer’s NSW executive manager Katherine Stone told a Diversity Council of Australia forum on eldercare last week: “We have ‘beginning of life’ leave through parental leave. We should also have ‘end of life’ leave because people only have one chance to get it right.”
It’s that “one chance to get it right” aspect that makes caring for elderly or sick parents just as emotionally consuming and important as raising young children. It’s a reason to take time off, to slow down a career, or to take a career break.
The real challenge is that you can’t predict how long that career break will be – and there’s usually no happy ending when it comes to the finishing point. As such, the policies and support structures we need for childcare cannot simply be replicated for eldercare.
As Professor Marian Baird, Director of the Women and Work Research Group at The University of Sydney noted at the forum last week, eldercare and childcare are not the same thing. The arrival of a child, as well as the caring responsibilities such a child will require, are usually pretty predictable. Such expectations and timeframes are not as easy to apply to eldercare. Often, the needs for such care can be sporadic, intense during certain periods and then straightforward to manage at others, and therefore more difficult to organise. It also requires a large amount of administrative work, dealing with care providers, doctors and hospitals.
So how can we better support those with such caring responsibilities?
Flexible work helps, but not in the way it helps those managing routine caring responsibilities — such as finishing early on a daily basis to manage the school pick up. What’s really needed is a cultural and structural adjustment to the way we work, to move from a focus on ‘presentism’ — that being sitting in an office — to productivity. Introducing new forms of unpaid leave could also assist with those helping an elderly person through a major illness or coping with the death of a parent.
But more important than any of the structural changes we can make are the assumptions we need to change regarding who is ultimately responsible for the care of others. Currently, it’s women who are feeling the big squeeze of caring responsibilities. It’s predominantly women who are caring for the young, and then caring for the elderly. Women who are often caring for the young and elderly at the same time. Women dealing with the struggle of balancing work with such caring commitments. And women who usually lose the choice regarding just how much they can invest in their careers.
Women, men and their employers must all step up to manage what will become a growing challenge in Australia.