Explaining the Gender Gap in Help to Parents

Natalia Sarkisian Naomi Gerstel created three hypothesis about the gender gap in help to parents.

Hypothesis
Hypothesis 1: Employment status reduces the gender gap in help given to parents with control for variables such as race, class, age, ect.

Hypothesis 2: Those employed in time consuming, lucrative, or satisfying job conditions provide less time helping their parents with less demanding, lucrative and satisfying jobs.

Hypothesis 3: Employment Status and characteristics including earnings, hours, schedules, self-employment, and job satisfaction are more strongly tied to parental assistance for women than for men.

Results
Hypothesis 1
The gender gap in help giving to parents is significant. Women provide an average of 3.8 hours a week to help parents and parent-in-laws, while men only help their parents 3 hours per week. Sarkisian and Gerstel also noticed men were more likely to be employed. They wanted to know if men and women employment difference account for the different amount of hours. Sarkisian and Gerstel found out that employment did make a difference. When marginal effects were controlled, employment status rendered the gender gap insignificant.

Hypothesis 2
Hypothesis two was confirmed on the same basis as the first hypothesis; employment drastically makes the difference between genders insignificant. Higher wages are associated with fewer hours of help in both gender groups, even if you are self-employed. The gender gap arises when discrimination based on sex is applied to women wages and job opportunities.

Hypothesis 3
Sarkinisian and Gerstel predicted that different processes would operate for women than for men. Although some controls that were placed had different relationship with men and women, employment did not change. They found no significant change between men and women relationship of employment status. This implies that men and women help is not dictated on their biological make up but more so on their opportunity to be employed.

Discussion Questions:
Why are structural Characteristics more successful in explaining the gender gap in the help to parents than in explaining the gender gaps in other sorts of family work?
Sarkisian and Gerstal claim that it might be possible that helping parents is less central to a gender performance. Helping your parents is not seen as a women job in the same way as taking care of children.

What are the causal processes underlying the relationship between employment characteristics and parental support?
There is no clears understanding in what direction this causation goes. It could be because people help their parents there is a wage penalty for both sexes. Another explanation could be that higher wages and self-employment of men and women produces opportunity cost of helping their parents.

Why are job hours, job schedules, and job satisfaction unrelated to helping parents for both genders and contribute very little to the gender gap?
Sarkisian and Gerstel suggest that these factor may lead to other structural factors. For example, if you do not like your job or schedule, you may quite your job and tend to your family more. Also, even though those conditions do not matter as much, other minor factors do, such as marriage, proximity, financial need. These factors are not directly related to employment that are shown to play a factor.

The Importance of the study
We are living in a country where two person incomes are needed for raising families and welfare is declining. Older citizens are losing benefits that support them after retirement and they are depending more and more on their children but more and more of their children are entering the labor force. As the gender gap continues to become more narrow, who is going to help our parents? Even more importantly, what is going to happen to the poorer families that can not afford elderly homes to compensate for their lack of time to help their parents?