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Caring for children and the elderly in Argentina: A grammar of class and gender inequalities
Women's Studies International Forum 72 (2019) 25–31
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Caring for children and the elderly in Argentina: A grammar of class and gender inequalities Eleonor Faura, Francisca Pereyrab, a b
T
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Universidad Nacional de San Martín, Argentina Universidad Nacional General Sarmiento, Argentina
ARTICLE INFO
ABSTRACT
Keywords: Social organization of care Childcare Elderly care Gender Social class Argentina
This article examines the social organization of care for children and dependent older adults in Argentina, based on data from the National Survey on Social Structure. It analyzes perceptions and practices around care in public and private institutions, home-based care services, and care provided by families, with a particular focus on gender implications. Due to a shortage of public services, care is highly feminized, largely performed by families, and subject to class inequalities. Although family care tends to be preferred for early childhood, among mothers with better labor opportunities there is a growing (and often unmet) demand for public care services. The outsourcing of care is more widely accepted for the elderly, for whom there is an acute lack of public services, but only better-off families can afford these privatized solutions. In both cases, the organization of care reflects shortfalls in care policies and deep-rooted cultural patterns.
Introduction This article analyzes and compares strategies and perceptions around the care of two population groups in Argentina today: children and elderly people who are dependent on others to go about their daily lives. It draws on data from Argentina's National Survey on Social Structure (Encuesta Nacional sobre la Estructura Social, ENES) and is representative of the country's entire population.1 Although all people need some form of care to survive, it is evident that some groups require more intense daily attention due to their age or because of some specific vulnerability (Esquivel, Faur, & Jelin, 2012). These include the two groups that we focus on in this text, which are present in over 40% of Argentinian households.2
The article analyzes strategies for providing care in households that include children aged 0 to 12 and adults over the age of 65 with some degree of dependence on others.3 It looks at household practices, access to state, private, and community care, the hiring of care staff, and the role of families and family members in providing care. Regardless of the objective possibilities and limitations that each household experiences when it comes to providing care, the article examines whether the respondents in question perceive difficulties in relation to this, which populations perceive the greatest difficulties, and what the specific issues are in each case. This sheds light on the subjective experiences of those who provide care and allows us to describe the relationship between the available alternatives and the ways in which care responsibilities are perceived.
Corresponding author. E-mail address: [email protected] (F. Pereyra). 1 The ENES is a national household survey that was carried out between 2014 and 2015. It provides information on a series of issues that are not covered in other representative surveys. It is part of the Research Program on Contemporary Argentinian Society (Programa de Investigación sobre la Sociedad Argentina Contemporánea, PISAC), a joint initiative that is coordinated by the Council of Deans of Schools of Social and Human Sciences of Argentina and the Ministry of Science, Technology, and Productive Innovation of Argentina, with support from the Secretariat of University Policies. 2 According to the ENES, there was at least one child under 12 in 39% of Argentinian households at the time of the survey. Around 30% of households included at least one person over the age of 65, and one in ten of these were dependent (Faur & Pereyra, 2018). 3 We focus on types of dependence that tend to be characterized as “basic,” that is, older people who have difficulty in moving around their homes by themselves and carrying out daily self-care activities such as cooking, eating, washing, or getting dressed. ⁎
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wsif.2018.11.004 Received 23 August 2018; Received in revised form 25 October 2018; Accepted 11 November 2018 0277-5395/ © 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Women's Studies International Forum 72 (2019) 25–31
E. Faur, F. Pereyra
Our analysis pays particular attention to similarities and differences in practices and perceptions of care in terms of the differences in the age and social class of those who require care.4 It also explores the impact of gender on unpaid care work5 in the light of households' different levels of access to available public, private, and community resources, how this access is affected by the social strata that they belong to, and the roles that men and women take on in providing direct care. To give a sense of context, the next section provides a brief overview of the conceptual framework and care policies that exist in Argentina for these two populations. In the following section, we present the results of our analysis of the organization of care for children and dependent older adults, and perceptions of the difficulties in providing this care. We then discuss these results and finish with some concluding remarks.
on Socioeconomic Structure showed that in 2014, 38% of total households were composed of a couple and children, 11% were run by a single parent (especially, mothers), and 1% by a same-sex couple (Binstock, 2018). Furthermore, population aging has brought new challenges and long-term care needs: in particular, people whose physical or cognitive abilities have deteriorated represent 10% of elder population (INDEC, 2014). How has the social organization of care adapted to these changes? First, it should be acknowledged that despite the significant role that families play in providing care, other institutions - such as the state, the market, and community organizations - also provide such services. The dynamic configuration of services provided by these institutions makes up a “care diamond” which varies from one society and sociopolitical context to the next. The role of the state is fundamental within this, as it provides care but also establishes the rules of play for markets, families, and communities (Razavi, 2007). In Argentina, previous studies have argued that there is no single care diamond, but rather different forms of social and political organization of care that are rooted in the unequal provision of social policies (Faur, 2011). These shape a particular dynamic in the supply of services and the ways in which homes from different social classes -and members of these access care and develop strategies to meet their families' needs. Which policies address care for children and dependent older people in Argentina? Before answering this question, it has to be pointed out that the approach to care policies presents significant challenges in Latin America in general. However, the situation in Argentina lags significantly behind that of some other countries in the region6 (see Batthyánny, 2015; Blofield & Martínez Franzoni, 2014). With regard to childcare, in Argentina there are a series of institutional alternatives established through labor law, including the right to paid maternity and paternity leave, education policies, and child development programs. These provisions are highly varied: there is greater protection in the public sector than the private and there are significant differences between provinces and the sectors in which people are employed. The outcome is that paid maternity leave ranges from between 90 and 200 days for mothers and 1 to 15 days for fathers (Faur, 2014). There are also deficits in the provision of nurseries or daycare facilities by employers (Rodríguez Enríquez & Pautassi, 2014). At the same time, these laws only protect those who are in formal employment, meaning that such benefits only extend to around half of working women, while those who are employed informally or selfemployed do not have access to them. There is a heterogeneous network of childcare services that is made up of institutions with different origins, regulatory frameworks, and professional profiles. Even though the provision of care is not the primary function of the education system, this does function as a way for families to outsource some aspects of childcare. These institutions may
Conceptual and policy background The traditional perception of care in Argentina is that this should be provided within the family, that women should be responsible for such tasks, and that they should perform them without being paid for doing so. This premise responds to a particular model of family life and gender relations that made a strong maternalistic mark on the country's culture and institutions (Nari, 2004). This led to the creation of a system of welfare and rights that shaped the provision of public services for children and the elderly which has tended to delegate direct care work to the household itself. In Argentina, as in much of the world, changes in economic, family, and gender dynamics have challenged this organization. The fragility of this model has been exposed by the significant increase in women's independence and participation in the labor market, as well as by the transformations in family life - particularly in relation to increased levels of separation and divorce and the prevalence of female-headed households (Jelin, 2010). In the Buenos Aires metropolitan area, single male provider households declined from 74.5% to 54.7% between 1980 and 2000, while two-provider households increased from 25.5% to 45.3% (Wainerman, 2003). The National Survey
4 We will use the level of education of the household's primary income-earner (PIE) as a proxy for social class. In this paper, we divide households into three strata: low (the PIE has not finished high school); medium (the PIE has finished high school or tertiary education or has started but not completed a university degree); and high (the PIE has a university degree). This allowed us to infer household's financial possibilities and the cultural models that might influence the habits, customs, and practices associated with care. Using this proxy also sidesteps the problems that come with using per-capita household income as a determining variable: this would not contribute independently to our analysis given that the feminization of care impacts on women's role in the labor market and thus on household income. 5 The concept of care work is indeed polysemic and has experienced changes in feminist debates throughout the last decades (for a review see Esquivel, 2012). We understand unpaid care work as those unremunerated tasks performed within households which comprise “direct” and “indirect” care. “Direct” care refers to those activities which involve face-to-face interaction in order to satisfy both physical and emotional needs of others (these include for example, activities that range from feeding or bathing someone to telling bedtime stories). “Indirect” care refers to all those domestic tasks which are a precondition so that direct care can be provided (and do not necessarily involve direct interaction with those who are benefited by this type of care). These include all the tasks related to the satisfaction of households' basic needs related to cleaning, food preparation, clothing, etc. (Benería, 1979 cited in Esquivel, 2012).
6 Uruguay for example, has become a model and a case-study since it has made care a core part of the social protection system provided by the state (see Amarante, Colacce, & Tenembaum, 2017).
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be public or private. Most children in Argentina who are at the age of compulsory education7 attend public schools, although there are significant numbers of private institutions—the quality of which varies greatly—especially in the wealthier parts of the country. For younger children, especially those under the age of three, for whom formal
Graph 1). In an extremely high proportion of cases, the main care providers are mothers: 80% of children under the age of four are looked after by their mothers, 5% are looked after by their fathers, and a further 5% by family members who live outside their homes (grandmothers, for example).
81
Father Mother Domestic worker/nanny Other household member Family member who does not live in the household 5
7 2
1
Others (not family)
Graph 1. Person who spends most of the day with children up to four years of age. Argentina, 2014–2015.
education is optional, there are limited public options and thus private services predominate. For children at this stage, there are also community kindergartens and Child Development Centers, which are generally mixed initiatives in which community institutions play a part and receive state financing. This scheme relies heavily on the work of lowincome women who lack specific qualifications, receive minimum pay (if any), and have no access to labor contracts and social protection (Fournier, 2017). Policies for the elderly have historically prioritized the provision of financial resources (retirement and old-age pensions) and healthcare services. These programs have extensive coverage: approximately 94% of the retirement-age population receive pensions and around 80% of the population over the age of 60 have access to public healthcare services. This makes Argentina an unusual case within Latin America (Gascón, 2016). With regard to direct care for older people, the Healthcare Program of the National Institute of Social Services for Retirees and Pensioners (Programa de Atención Médica del Instituto Nacional de Servicios Sociales para Jubilados y Pensionados, PAMI) runs residential homes for long-term care.8 These are reserved exclusively for those who demonstrate that they cannot afford to pay for such care elsewhere, and no information is available on their level of coverage. With regard to home-based care, Argentina has a nationwide program to train home-based carers, but despite this, the services generated through this system are very limited. All told, there has been little emphasis on providing services and/or subsidies for the direct care of the elderly.
Among children between the ages of five and twelve, although the mother continues to be the main carer, her role becomes less important. In some homes, hiring paid domestic workers is one of the strategies used for delegating family care, even though the mother is still the main carer for most of the day. Class differences have a significant effect on this: around 30% of the households classified as belonging to a high socioeconomic stratum with children under 12 hire out some form of care. Some 26% hire domestic workers (who combine cleaning with looking after children), 11% pay for nannies or childminders, and 10% hire both alternatives at the same time. In contrast, just 3% of households in the lowest socioeconomic group say they pay for services of this sort. The possibility of delegating some care responsibilities and redistributing them between the family and other institutions depends largely on the availability of public services. How far do Argentinian households have access to state, private, and community institutions of this sort? The statistics point to a gradual increase access as children get older. Only 11% of children under the age of two go to a kindergarten or daycare center. This share increases fivefold among three- and fouryear-olds (58% of whom attend educational or care facilities), and soars to 93% among five- to twelve-year-olds. In-depth analysis of care for each age group reveals marked differences between social classes, especially when the children in question are younger. Among children under the age of two, for each child from the lowest socioeconomic stratum who attends a facility of this sort, there are four children from wealthier homes who do so (7% versus 30%). Most children from households in the high socioeconomic stratum go to privately run services, while those in the low group largely attend state-run services. Therefore, among families who cannot afford to pay for a private kindergarten, the possibility of sending children under the age of two to early education or care facilities is limited.
Caring for children In any analysis of childcare, the role of families is fundamental (see 7 Federal Education Law 24.195 of 1993 made education compulsory from the age of five, and this has recently been extended to the age of four (Law 27.045). Primary school education (from the age of 6 to 12) was made compulsory in 1884 (Law 1420) and is almost universally available. 8 PAMI operates its own old people's homes and has agreements with some privately run ones.
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Graph 2. Children's schooling rates by age, socioeconomic group (SEG), and type of institution. Argentina, 2014–2015.
There is greater provision of state-run services for three- to fouryear-olds, and a corresponding increase in attendance rate. Some 37% of children in this age group go to a state kindergarten, 19% to private kindergartens, and just 2% to community-run kindergartens. Although attendance rates among children in the high socioeconomic group still outstrip those of children in the low socioeconomic group (77% versus 46%), those of the latter are nearly seven times higher for this age group than for younger children (46% versus 7%). Among children in the high socioeconomic group, attendance at privately run institutions remains higher than at public ones. Access to community-run kindergartens remains marginal. Although these are significant because they generate community-based alternatives for low-income populations, they only account for 2% of the children who attend early education or care facilities. For children between the ages of five and twelve, attendance at educational establishments is almost universal and far outstrips the rates for younger children. This reflects the vast availability of services and a well-established demand for them, which is rooted in Argentina's long history of compulsory primary education and provision of this on the part of the state. Most children (75%) go to public schools. In contrast to the situation among younger children, those who attend private education facilities do so as part of a deliberate family strategy rather than to make up for the absence of public services.
The length of the school day and the availability of longer school hours are key factors when it comes to choosing between educational institutions. In the case of kindergartens (for children up to the age of five), data for the whole of Argentina shows that only 2.5% of such services cover a full school day (7 h) while 97.5% only cover half a day (three-and-a-half hours) (Faur, 2014). Among five- to twelve-year-olds, 91% are at school for half the day (4 to 5 h per day) and only 9% spend a full school day there (8 h). Social class is not the defining factor behind these differences, at least not directly. Instead, the most significant variations in the availability of full-day schooling are related to children's place of residence. In the City of Buenos Aires, the wealthiest area in the country, 18% of the children who go to kindergarten attend institutions that provide full-day services. Some 30% of these children go to public kindergartens (Faur, 2014). Among five- to twelve-year-olds, nearly five out of every ten children attend institutions that provide full-day schooling. Of these, 52.3% go to public schools and 47.7% to private schools. No other region in the country has attendance rates of over 7% for full-day schooling. Care for the elderly
Graph 3. Main person in charge of caring for dependent older adults by SEG. Argentina 2014–12015.
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Home-based care plays a key role among dependent older adults. In eight out of every ten cases, these are cared for by a friend or family member. In half of these cases, this is someone who lives in the same household.
Those who live with dependent older adults perceive much greater difficulties in organizing care for them than for children. In this case, one in every four respondents mentioned these, a rate that was constant across all socioeconomic groups.
Graph 4. Main perceived difficulty in organizing care for children under the age of four. Argentina and City of Buenos Aires, 2014–2015.
Care strategies for dependent older adults differ significantly from one socioeconomic group to the next. The provision of care by family members is especially common among households in the low or medium socioeconomic strata while hiring home-based care services is especially common among those in the higher stratum, where it accounts for 60% of cases. Although care by family members is by far the more common option, paid care is also significant within households in the lower stratum, 20% of which hire such services. Meanwhile, in only 1% of all households, care is provided by someone with connections to a public home-based care program. As is to be expected, the few families who do access such services are at the lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum. The data from the ENES does not provide insight into institutionalization rates among the elderly at either state-run or private facilities, and there is no other national data that allows this to be estimated.
Likewise, the specific difficulties in caring for older people are very different to those observed in caring for children. In this case, half of the respondents said that their main difficulty was their inability to afford to hire paid carers or the lack of public services. The former was mentioned by three out of every ten respondents while two out of every ten cited the latter. Discussion The metaphor of the care diamond is a useful way of framing our analysis of these results and focusing on our findings regarding people's perceptions of caring for children and dependent older adults. How far do families, the state, the market, and the community participate in caring for the populations in question? What are the differences between the households from the two age groups and within each of them? In this context, how should we interpret the different perceptions that were observed in relation to difficulties in providing care? To start with, the strategies for caring for children and the elderly both reveal a significant degree of dependence on family members. Beyond this common ground, there are some specific issues which merit discussion. In the overwhelming majority of cases, children spend most of their time with their mothers, but a much wider variety of people, including both family and friends, are involved in caring for dependent older adults. Logically, this diversification is due to differences in household structures and the family dynamics of the elderly (it is usually someone from a younger generation who is responsible for their care). In both cases, the preponderance of care from family members has profound gender implications. Those who are responsible for the systematic and unpaid provision of care are generally women. Women spend an average nine extra hours per week than men on domestic and care activities. In households where there are children under the age of 12, this gender gap increases to 15 h per week (Faur & Pereyra, 2018).9 Public care services provide vital alternatives to family-based care but the specific nature of these and the extent of coverage is very different for each of the population groups in question. This results in strategies for distributing childcare between the family, the state, and the market that vary significantly from one socioeconomic group to the next. The role of the state in providing childcare is widespread from the
Perceptions of difficulties in providing care Taking into account the context described, it is interesting to note that just 10% of respondents said they had difficulties in managing care for children under the age of four. However, there were some interesting variations within this group. Among the youngest children (those under two years of age), answers were the same across the social spectrum, but there were marked differences between the different socioeconomic groups for children between the ages of three and four: 19% of respondents from households in the high socioeconomic stratum said they had difficulties managing childcare, which is around double the rate of those who claimed this among households in the low stratum, 9% of whom expressed such difficulties. As we will discuss later, this situation may be due to the higher levels of education among women from the higher socioeconomic group, which implies they have better chances of participating in the labor market. Throughout the country, 38% of those who said they had difficulties in managing childcare said that the main problem was that they had no family members to help them. The second-most-prevalent difficulty was being unable to afford to hire private services (32%) while just 9% mentioned the lack of public services as a specific obstacle. This response pattern changed dramatically in the City of Buenos Aires, where 32% of respondents pointed to the lack of public services as their main difficulty while the inability to afford paid services ranked second (28%). The share who mentioned not having family members to help them was much smaller.
9 Women's participation in the labor market lags 22 percentage points behind men's, and this gender gap increases to 32 percentage points when the women have children to care for (Faur & Pereyra, 2018).
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age of five onward, when compulsory schooling laws means that the state must guarantee that sufficient school places are available. Before this point, access to childcare or early education facilities depends largely on the differences between regions (there is greater availability of such services in the City of Buenos Aires) or families' abilities to pay for them. Bearing in mind that over half the children in the country live in households that fall into the low socioeconomic stratum, it is clear that low levels of attendance at early education or care facilities during the earliest years of life have significant implications on the reproduction of social inequalities, as women who are responsible for caring for very young children have less opportunity to participate in activities outside the home (especially the labor market). In the case of dependent older adults, the most widespread alternative to family-based care is hiring paid services. Indeed, relatives and friends are the main care providers for dependent older adults from households in the low and medium socioeconomic groups while those from the high socioeconomic group delegate daily care to hired staff in 60% of cases. Given the limited availability of state-run care services and the increased tendency to outsource care for this segment of the population, the hiring of paid care staff is significant even among households from the low socioeconomic stratum, 20% of which do so. Although private institutions for long-term residential care are proliferating in Argentina, there is still no systematic information available through which to quantify this. In sum, the role of the state is more significant in relation to caring for children -although only from the age of five onward - but is extremely limited among dependent older adults, where it only extends to providing retirement pay and old-age pensions. The role of communityrun care services is limited for both children and the elderly. At the end of the day, the shortfall in state-run services is made up for by the market, but only for households that can afford this option. As a consequence, social class is a defining aspect of the way in which children and dependent adults are cared for and their access to services. The more financial resources available to a home, the more care is shared with other institutions or hired staff. Although this does not completely replace family care, it complements it by reducing the care burden and the amount of time spent on these activities. Childcare is privatized through access to private kindergartens and schools and also through the hiring of nannies and other domestic employees. These strategies may overlap, which increases both the class and gender divide, putting women from households in the high socioeconomic stratum in a relatively better position than their counterparts at the lower end of the spectrum. The limited perception of difficulties in providing care points to a naturalization of care provision by family members. However, this does not present itself in the same way for children and elderly, which reveals interesting differences in relation to the stage of life of the people being cared for. For children under the age of two, the difficulties perceived are insignificant. This is true despite the fact that alternatives for outsourcing childcare from family are very limited because of the lack of public care services and the brevity of maternity and paternity leave. This suggests that a widespread culture that assumes care for small children to be the mother's responsibility overlaps with the shortfalls in public policies that target this segment of the population. Among children aged three to four, when attendance at educational institutions is more accepted, as is the possibility of sharing family responsibilities with other institutions, mentions of difficulties in providing care increase notably among survey respondents, especially those from the high socioeconomic stratum. Such difficulties were mentioned most frequently in households that included women with higher levels of education and who thus had better chances of taking part in the labor market under favourable conditions.10 This situation also implies greater availability of financial resources that allow part of care work to be delegated (without this implying that all of the woman's
earnings need to be spent on outsourcing care services). The combination of these factors may lead to a weakening of maternalist ideas around the care of children of these ages in the highest socioeconomic stratum. Far more difficulties are perceived in relation to providing care for dependent older adults. Experiences around the world suggest that care for older family members is creating new social and economic tensions. The economic and emotional burden of care tends to fall on women, who are the ones who shoulder the physical and emotional costs of such care, which often overlaps with looking after their own children (Gascón & Redondo, 2014). In the absence of the maternalist mandate that suggests that mothers are -and should be - the best carers for their children, perceptions of difficulties increase. The types of difficulties that are reported are revealing in that they reflect the structure of possibilities for outsourcing care that each group can aspire to. In the country as a whole, the specific difficulty that is mentioned most in relation to childcare is “the lack of other family members to help.” In contrast, the lack of public childcare services is at the top of the list in the City of Buenos Aires, even though such services are far more available there than anywhere else in Argentina. Indeed, earlier studies, such as Faur (2014), have observed that women who live in areas with fewer public services are the least likely to see outsourcing care through educational institutions as being a possibility (and thus demand for these services is lower). With regard to care for the elderly, the difficulty mentioned most is the inability to afford such services. This reflects the reality of life for this population group, which is characterized by the absence of care provision on the part of the state and the frequency with which this is privatized. From a class perspective, the greater the possibilities of delegating care, the less the provision of care by family members is naturalized. This is true of both care for older adults and children and it points to how perceptions around who is responsible for care are constructed in dialogue with each household's real possibilities of accessing this. These, in turn, are shaped by public care policies, and deep-rooted cultural patterns also play an important part. Regardless, our culture tends to highlight certain moral stances in relation to care tasks: the “joys and burdens of care,” as Joan Tronto (2018) calls them, are perceived differently in relation to caring for children and older adults. The saccharine image of caring mothers reinforces this idea of joy while invisibilizing the burden of daily unpaid work. In relation to care for the elderly, once the overexaggerated figure of the mother is no longer a possible care provider, the real burdens of care become more evident. Final reflections By interlacing structural, cultural, and moral perspectives, this article has shown how different forms of social and political organization of care are reproduced in today's Argentina. This has become a major factor behind the reproduction of class and gender inequalities. In particular, the lack of public and accessible services to delegate care tends to retain women from low-income households (who cannot pay private solutions) within the boundaries of the domestic sphere. This results not only in a reduction of their possibilities of independence and personal fulfillment but also curtails their possibilities of improving both their personal economic situation and that of their households, through participation in remunerated labor. To revert this trend, there 10 In fact, mothers of children aged three to four from the high socio-economic stratum exhibit an activity rate of 87,3% whereas among their counterparts from the low socioeconomic stratum the activity rate is 53,5%. Seen from another point of view, mothers of children aged three to four who participate in the labor market show significantly higher educational credential than those of mothers who do not take part in the labor market (almost 40% have completed tertiary of university studies versus 15% among their inactive counterparts).
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needs to be a public commitment to providing care for early childhood and dependent older people. Public policies around care are especially important in this regard. In particular, the form that these take has very significant gender-related repercussions: they may continue to confine women to the role of caregivers (in keeping with traditional ideas of femininity and maternity) or the provision of care services can “socialize” the costs of care and open up options for women to participate in the labor market and the public sphere as a whole (Razavi, 2007). Access to free state or community-run care services is a key mechanism for families to be able to create a stable balance between time and space for work and family life in a way that is not dependent on the financial circumstances of the families in question, the gender of their members, or the region of the country where they lived. Prioritizing this issue within the political agenda implies recognizing care as being not a personal problem but a public one that has serious implications on the well-being of the population and thus on the possibilities of creating a more equal society.
Binstock, G. (2018). Hogares y organización familiar. In J. I. Piovani, & A. Salvia (Eds.). La Argentina en el siglo XXI. Cómo somos, vivimos y convivimos en una sociedad desigual. Bs. As.: Siglo XXI (pp. 421–442). . Blofield, M., & Martínez Franzoni, J. (2014). Trabajo, familia y cambios en la política pública en América Latina. Equidad, maternalismo y corresponsabilidad. Revista de la Cepal, 114 (Santiago de Chile). Esquivel, V. (2012). “Cuidado, economía y agendas políticas: una mirada conceptual sobre la organización social del cuidado en América Latina” in La economía feminista desde América Latina. Una hoja de ruta sobre los debates actuales en la región. Santo Domingo: ONU Mujeres. Esquivel, V., Faur, E., & Jelin, E. (2012). Hacia la conceptualización del cuidado: familia, mercado y estado. In V. Esquivel, E. Faur, & E. Jelin (Eds.). Las lógicas del cuidado infantil. Entre las familias, el Estado y el mercado. Buenos Aires: IDES-UNICEF-UNPFA. Faur, E. (2011). A widening gap? The political and social organization of childcare in Argentina. Development and Change, 42(4), 967–994. Faur, E. (2014). El cuidado infantil en el siglo XXI. Mujeres malabaristas en una sociedad desigual, Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI. Faur, E., & Pereyra, F. (2018). Gramáticas del cuidado. In J. Piovani, & A. Salvia (Eds.). La Argentina en el Siglo XXI. Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI Editores. Fournier, M. (2017). La labor de las trabajadoras comunitarias del cuidado infantil in el conurbano bonaerense: ¿una forma de subsidio de “abajo hacia arriba”? Trabajo y Sociedad, 28, 83–108. Gascón, S. (2016). Políticas sociales y adultos mayores en Argentina. In E. Faur (Ed.). Repensar la inclusión social. Políticas públicas y sociedad civil en la Argentina (1991–2016). Buenos Aires: Capital Intelectual - Fundación Tzedaká. Gascón, S., & Redondo, N. (2014). Calidad de los servicios de largo plazo para personas adultas mayores con dependencia, Serie Políticas Sociales. Santiago de Chile: CEPAL Eurosocial. INDEC (2014). Encuesta Nacional sobre Calidad de Vida de Adultos Mayores 2012 (Encaviam), Principales resultados, Serie Estudios. 46. Buenos Aires: Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Censo. Jelin, E. (2010). Pan y afectos. La transformación de las familias. Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Nari, M. (2004). Políticas de maternidad y maternalismo político. Buenos Aires: Biblos. Razavi, S. (2007). The political and social economy of care in a development context: Conceptual issues, research questions and policy options. Gender and Development, 3 (Ginebra, United Nations Research Institute for Social Development). Rodríguez Enríquez, C., & Pautassi, L. (2014). La Organización Social del Cuidado de Niños y Niñas. Elementos para la construcción de una agenda de cuidados en Argentina. Buenos Aires: Equipo Latinoamericano de Justicia y Género (ELA). Tronto, J. (2018). Economía, ética y democracia: tres lenguajes en torno al cuidado. In L. G. Arango Gaviria, A. Urquijo, T. Pérez-Bustos, & J. Pineda Duque (Eds.). Género y cuidado. Teorías, escenarios y políticas. Bogotá: Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Pontificia Universidad Javeriana y Universidad de los Andes. Wainerman, C. (2003). Familia y trabajo. La reestructuración de las fronteras de género. In C. Wainerman (Ed.). Familia, trabajo y género. Un mundo de nuevas relaciones. Buenos Aires: UNICEF-Fondo de Cultura Económica.
Funding This work was supported by a joint grant from the National Council of Scientific and Technical Research (CONICET) and the Universidad Nacional General Sarmiento in Argentina (grant number: PIO-CONICET 14420140100015CO). The data analysis process also benefited from funding from the Research Program on Contemporary Argentinean Society (PISAC) and the International Center for Development and Decent Work at Kassel University. References Amarante, V., Colacce, M., & Tenembaum, V. (2017). National care system in Uruguay, working paper 2/2017, World Institute for Development Economics Research. Helsinki: United Nations University. Batthyánny, K. (2015). Las políticas y el cuidado en América Latina. Una mirada a las experiencias regionales. Santiago de Chile: Cepal - Aecid. 10 December www.repositorio. cepal.org. Benería, L. (1979). Reproduction, production and the sexual división of labour. Cambridge Journal of Economics, 3(3), 203–225.
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Women's Studies International Forum journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/wsif
Caring for children and the elderly in Argentina: A grammar of class and gender inequalities Eleonor Faura, Francisca Pereyrab, a b
T
⁎
Universidad Nacional de San Martín, Argentina Universidad Nacional General Sarmiento, Argentina
ARTICLE INFO
ABSTRACT
Keywords: Social organization of care Childcare Elderly care Gender Social class Argentina
This article examines the social organization of care for children and dependent older adults in Argentina, based on data from the National Survey on Social Structure. It analyzes perceptions and practices around care in public and private institutions, home-based care services, and care provided by families, with a particular focus on gender implications. Due to a shortage of public services, care is highly feminized, largely performed by families, and subject to class inequalities. Although family care tends to be preferred for early childhood, among mothers with better labor opportunities there is a growing (and often unmet) demand for public care services. The outsourcing of care is more widely accepted for the elderly, for whom there is an acute lack of public services, but only better-off families can afford these privatized solutions. In both cases, the organization of care reflects shortfalls in care policies and deep-rooted cultural patterns.
Introduction This article analyzes and compares strategies and perceptions around the care of two population groups in Argentina today: children and elderly people who are dependent on others to go about their daily lives. It draws on data from Argentina's National Survey on Social Structure (Encuesta Nacional sobre la Estructura Social, ENES) and is representative of the country's entire population.1 Although all people need some form of care to survive, it is evident that some groups require more intense daily attention due to their age or because of some specific vulnerability (Esquivel, Faur, & Jelin, 2012). These include the two groups that we focus on in this text, which are present in over 40% of Argentinian households.2
The article analyzes strategies for providing care in households that include children aged 0 to 12 and adults over the age of 65 with some degree of dependence on others.3 It looks at household practices, access to state, private, and community care, the hiring of care staff, and the role of families and family members in providing care. Regardless of the objective possibilities and limitations that each household experiences when it comes to providing care, the article examines whether the respondents in question perceive difficulties in relation to this, which populations perceive the greatest difficulties, and what the specific issues are in each case. This sheds light on the subjective experiences of those who provide care and allows us to describe the relationship between the available alternatives and the ways in which care responsibilities are perceived.
Corresponding author. E-mail address: [email protected] (F. Pereyra). 1 The ENES is a national household survey that was carried out between 2014 and 2015. It provides information on a series of issues that are not covered in other representative surveys. It is part of the Research Program on Contemporary Argentinian Society (Programa de Investigación sobre la Sociedad Argentina Contemporánea, PISAC), a joint initiative that is coordinated by the Council of Deans of Schools of Social and Human Sciences of Argentina and the Ministry of Science, Technology, and Productive Innovation of Argentina, with support from the Secretariat of University Policies. 2 According to the ENES, there was at least one child under 12 in 39% of Argentinian households at the time of the survey. Around 30% of households included at least one person over the age of 65, and one in ten of these were dependent (Faur & Pereyra, 2018). 3 We focus on types of dependence that tend to be characterized as “basic,” that is, older people who have difficulty in moving around their homes by themselves and carrying out daily self-care activities such as cooking, eating, washing, or getting dressed. ⁎
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wsif.2018.11.004 Received 23 August 2018; Received in revised form 25 October 2018; Accepted 11 November 2018 0277-5395/ © 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
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Our analysis pays particular attention to similarities and differences in practices and perceptions of care in terms of the differences in the age and social class of those who require care.4 It also explores the impact of gender on unpaid care work5 in the light of households' different levels of access to available public, private, and community resources, how this access is affected by the social strata that they belong to, and the roles that men and women take on in providing direct care. To give a sense of context, the next section provides a brief overview of the conceptual framework and care policies that exist in Argentina for these two populations. In the following section, we present the results of our analysis of the organization of care for children and dependent older adults, and perceptions of the difficulties in providing this care. We then discuss these results and finish with some concluding remarks.
on Socioeconomic Structure showed that in 2014, 38% of total households were composed of a couple and children, 11% were run by a single parent (especially, mothers), and 1% by a same-sex couple (Binstock, 2018). Furthermore, population aging has brought new challenges and long-term care needs: in particular, people whose physical or cognitive abilities have deteriorated represent 10% of elder population (INDEC, 2014). How has the social organization of care adapted to these changes? First, it should be acknowledged that despite the significant role that families play in providing care, other institutions - such as the state, the market, and community organizations - also provide such services. The dynamic configuration of services provided by these institutions makes up a “care diamond” which varies from one society and sociopolitical context to the next. The role of the state is fundamental within this, as it provides care but also establishes the rules of play for markets, families, and communities (Razavi, 2007). In Argentina, previous studies have argued that there is no single care diamond, but rather different forms of social and political organization of care that are rooted in the unequal provision of social policies (Faur, 2011). These shape a particular dynamic in the supply of services and the ways in which homes from different social classes -and members of these access care and develop strategies to meet their families' needs. Which policies address care for children and dependent older people in Argentina? Before answering this question, it has to be pointed out that the approach to care policies presents significant challenges in Latin America in general. However, the situation in Argentina lags significantly behind that of some other countries in the region6 (see Batthyánny, 2015; Blofield & Martínez Franzoni, 2014). With regard to childcare, in Argentina there are a series of institutional alternatives established through labor law, including the right to paid maternity and paternity leave, education policies, and child development programs. These provisions are highly varied: there is greater protection in the public sector than the private and there are significant differences between provinces and the sectors in which people are employed. The outcome is that paid maternity leave ranges from between 90 and 200 days for mothers and 1 to 15 days for fathers (Faur, 2014). There are also deficits in the provision of nurseries or daycare facilities by employers (Rodríguez Enríquez & Pautassi, 2014). At the same time, these laws only protect those who are in formal employment, meaning that such benefits only extend to around half of working women, while those who are employed informally or selfemployed do not have access to them. There is a heterogeneous network of childcare services that is made up of institutions with different origins, regulatory frameworks, and professional profiles. Even though the provision of care is not the primary function of the education system, this does function as a way for families to outsource some aspects of childcare. These institutions may
Conceptual and policy background The traditional perception of care in Argentina is that this should be provided within the family, that women should be responsible for such tasks, and that they should perform them without being paid for doing so. This premise responds to a particular model of family life and gender relations that made a strong maternalistic mark on the country's culture and institutions (Nari, 2004). This led to the creation of a system of welfare and rights that shaped the provision of public services for children and the elderly which has tended to delegate direct care work to the household itself. In Argentina, as in much of the world, changes in economic, family, and gender dynamics have challenged this organization. The fragility of this model has been exposed by the significant increase in women's independence and participation in the labor market, as well as by the transformations in family life - particularly in relation to increased levels of separation and divorce and the prevalence of female-headed households (Jelin, 2010). In the Buenos Aires metropolitan area, single male provider households declined from 74.5% to 54.7% between 1980 and 2000, while two-provider households increased from 25.5% to 45.3% (Wainerman, 2003). The National Survey
4 We will use the level of education of the household's primary income-earner (PIE) as a proxy for social class. In this paper, we divide households into three strata: low (the PIE has not finished high school); medium (the PIE has finished high school or tertiary education or has started but not completed a university degree); and high (the PIE has a university degree). This allowed us to infer household's financial possibilities and the cultural models that might influence the habits, customs, and practices associated with care. Using this proxy also sidesteps the problems that come with using per-capita household income as a determining variable: this would not contribute independently to our analysis given that the feminization of care impacts on women's role in the labor market and thus on household income. 5 The concept of care work is indeed polysemic and has experienced changes in feminist debates throughout the last decades (for a review see Esquivel, 2012). We understand unpaid care work as those unremunerated tasks performed within households which comprise “direct” and “indirect” care. “Direct” care refers to those activities which involve face-to-face interaction in order to satisfy both physical and emotional needs of others (these include for example, activities that range from feeding or bathing someone to telling bedtime stories). “Indirect” care refers to all those domestic tasks which are a precondition so that direct care can be provided (and do not necessarily involve direct interaction with those who are benefited by this type of care). These include all the tasks related to the satisfaction of households' basic needs related to cleaning, food preparation, clothing, etc. (Benería, 1979 cited in Esquivel, 2012).
6 Uruguay for example, has become a model and a case-study since it has made care a core part of the social protection system provided by the state (see Amarante, Colacce, & Tenembaum, 2017).
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be public or private. Most children in Argentina who are at the age of compulsory education7 attend public schools, although there are significant numbers of private institutions—the quality of which varies greatly—especially in the wealthier parts of the country. For younger children, especially those under the age of three, for whom formal
Graph 1). In an extremely high proportion of cases, the main care providers are mothers: 80% of children under the age of four are looked after by their mothers, 5% are looked after by their fathers, and a further 5% by family members who live outside their homes (grandmothers, for example).
81
Father Mother Domestic worker/nanny Other household member Family member who does not live in the household 5
7 2
1
Others (not family)
Graph 1. Person who spends most of the day with children up to four years of age. Argentina, 2014–2015.
education is optional, there are limited public options and thus private services predominate. For children at this stage, there are also community kindergartens and Child Development Centers, which are generally mixed initiatives in which community institutions play a part and receive state financing. This scheme relies heavily on the work of lowincome women who lack specific qualifications, receive minimum pay (if any), and have no access to labor contracts and social protection (Fournier, 2017). Policies for the elderly have historically prioritized the provision of financial resources (retirement and old-age pensions) and healthcare services. These programs have extensive coverage: approximately 94% of the retirement-age population receive pensions and around 80% of the population over the age of 60 have access to public healthcare services. This makes Argentina an unusual case within Latin America (Gascón, 2016). With regard to direct care for older people, the Healthcare Program of the National Institute of Social Services for Retirees and Pensioners (Programa de Atención Médica del Instituto Nacional de Servicios Sociales para Jubilados y Pensionados, PAMI) runs residential homes for long-term care.8 These are reserved exclusively for those who demonstrate that they cannot afford to pay for such care elsewhere, and no information is available on their level of coverage. With regard to home-based care, Argentina has a nationwide program to train home-based carers, but despite this, the services generated through this system are very limited. All told, there has been little emphasis on providing services and/or subsidies for the direct care of the elderly.
Among children between the ages of five and twelve, although the mother continues to be the main carer, her role becomes less important. In some homes, hiring paid domestic workers is one of the strategies used for delegating family care, even though the mother is still the main carer for most of the day. Class differences have a significant effect on this: around 30% of the households classified as belonging to a high socioeconomic stratum with children under 12 hire out some form of care. Some 26% hire domestic workers (who combine cleaning with looking after children), 11% pay for nannies or childminders, and 10% hire both alternatives at the same time. In contrast, just 3% of households in the lowest socioeconomic group say they pay for services of this sort. The possibility of delegating some care responsibilities and redistributing them between the family and other institutions depends largely on the availability of public services. How far do Argentinian households have access to state, private, and community institutions of this sort? The statistics point to a gradual increase access as children get older. Only 11% of children under the age of two go to a kindergarten or daycare center. This share increases fivefold among three- and fouryear-olds (58% of whom attend educational or care facilities), and soars to 93% among five- to twelve-year-olds. In-depth analysis of care for each age group reveals marked differences between social classes, especially when the children in question are younger. Among children under the age of two, for each child from the lowest socioeconomic stratum who attends a facility of this sort, there are four children from wealthier homes who do so (7% versus 30%). Most children from households in the high socioeconomic stratum go to privately run services, while those in the low group largely attend state-run services. Therefore, among families who cannot afford to pay for a private kindergarten, the possibility of sending children under the age of two to early education or care facilities is limited.
Caring for children In any analysis of childcare, the role of families is fundamental (see 7 Federal Education Law 24.195 of 1993 made education compulsory from the age of five, and this has recently been extended to the age of four (Law 27.045). Primary school education (from the age of 6 to 12) was made compulsory in 1884 (Law 1420) and is almost universally available. 8 PAMI operates its own old people's homes and has agreements with some privately run ones.
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Graph 2. Children's schooling rates by age, socioeconomic group (SEG), and type of institution. Argentina, 2014–2015.
There is greater provision of state-run services for three- to fouryear-olds, and a corresponding increase in attendance rate. Some 37% of children in this age group go to a state kindergarten, 19% to private kindergartens, and just 2% to community-run kindergartens. Although attendance rates among children in the high socioeconomic group still outstrip those of children in the low socioeconomic group (77% versus 46%), those of the latter are nearly seven times higher for this age group than for younger children (46% versus 7%). Among children in the high socioeconomic group, attendance at privately run institutions remains higher than at public ones. Access to community-run kindergartens remains marginal. Although these are significant because they generate community-based alternatives for low-income populations, they only account for 2% of the children who attend early education or care facilities. For children between the ages of five and twelve, attendance at educational establishments is almost universal and far outstrips the rates for younger children. This reflects the vast availability of services and a well-established demand for them, which is rooted in Argentina's long history of compulsory primary education and provision of this on the part of the state. Most children (75%) go to public schools. In contrast to the situation among younger children, those who attend private education facilities do so as part of a deliberate family strategy rather than to make up for the absence of public services.
The length of the school day and the availability of longer school hours are key factors when it comes to choosing between educational institutions. In the case of kindergartens (for children up to the age of five), data for the whole of Argentina shows that only 2.5% of such services cover a full school day (7 h) while 97.5% only cover half a day (three-and-a-half hours) (Faur, 2014). Among five- to twelve-year-olds, 91% are at school for half the day (4 to 5 h per day) and only 9% spend a full school day there (8 h). Social class is not the defining factor behind these differences, at least not directly. Instead, the most significant variations in the availability of full-day schooling are related to children's place of residence. In the City of Buenos Aires, the wealthiest area in the country, 18% of the children who go to kindergarten attend institutions that provide full-day services. Some 30% of these children go to public kindergartens (Faur, 2014). Among five- to twelve-year-olds, nearly five out of every ten children attend institutions that provide full-day schooling. Of these, 52.3% go to public schools and 47.7% to private schools. No other region in the country has attendance rates of over 7% for full-day schooling. Care for the elderly
Graph 3. Main person in charge of caring for dependent older adults by SEG. Argentina 2014–12015.
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Home-based care plays a key role among dependent older adults. In eight out of every ten cases, these are cared for by a friend or family member. In half of these cases, this is someone who lives in the same household.
Those who live with dependent older adults perceive much greater difficulties in organizing care for them than for children. In this case, one in every four respondents mentioned these, a rate that was constant across all socioeconomic groups.
Graph 4. Main perceived difficulty in organizing care for children under the age of four. Argentina and City of Buenos Aires, 2014–2015.
Care strategies for dependent older adults differ significantly from one socioeconomic group to the next. The provision of care by family members is especially common among households in the low or medium socioeconomic strata while hiring home-based care services is especially common among those in the higher stratum, where it accounts for 60% of cases. Although care by family members is by far the more common option, paid care is also significant within households in the lower stratum, 20% of which hire such services. Meanwhile, in only 1% of all households, care is provided by someone with connections to a public home-based care program. As is to be expected, the few families who do access such services are at the lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum. The data from the ENES does not provide insight into institutionalization rates among the elderly at either state-run or private facilities, and there is no other national data that allows this to be estimated.
Likewise, the specific difficulties in caring for older people are very different to those observed in caring for children. In this case, half of the respondents said that their main difficulty was their inability to afford to hire paid carers or the lack of public services. The former was mentioned by three out of every ten respondents while two out of every ten cited the latter. Discussion The metaphor of the care diamond is a useful way of framing our analysis of these results and focusing on our findings regarding people's perceptions of caring for children and dependent older adults. How far do families, the state, the market, and the community participate in caring for the populations in question? What are the differences between the households from the two age groups and within each of them? In this context, how should we interpret the different perceptions that were observed in relation to difficulties in providing care? To start with, the strategies for caring for children and the elderly both reveal a significant degree of dependence on family members. Beyond this common ground, there are some specific issues which merit discussion. In the overwhelming majority of cases, children spend most of their time with their mothers, but a much wider variety of people, including both family and friends, are involved in caring for dependent older adults. Logically, this diversification is due to differences in household structures and the family dynamics of the elderly (it is usually someone from a younger generation who is responsible for their care). In both cases, the preponderance of care from family members has profound gender implications. Those who are responsible for the systematic and unpaid provision of care are generally women. Women spend an average nine extra hours per week than men on domestic and care activities. In households where there are children under the age of 12, this gender gap increases to 15 h per week (Faur & Pereyra, 2018).9 Public care services provide vital alternatives to family-based care but the specific nature of these and the extent of coverage is very different for each of the population groups in question. This results in strategies for distributing childcare between the family, the state, and the market that vary significantly from one socioeconomic group to the next. The role of the state in providing childcare is widespread from the
Perceptions of difficulties in providing care Taking into account the context described, it is interesting to note that just 10% of respondents said they had difficulties in managing care for children under the age of four. However, there were some interesting variations within this group. Among the youngest children (those under two years of age), answers were the same across the social spectrum, but there were marked differences between the different socioeconomic groups for children between the ages of three and four: 19% of respondents from households in the high socioeconomic stratum said they had difficulties managing childcare, which is around double the rate of those who claimed this among households in the low stratum, 9% of whom expressed such difficulties. As we will discuss later, this situation may be due to the higher levels of education among women from the higher socioeconomic group, which implies they have better chances of participating in the labor market. Throughout the country, 38% of those who said they had difficulties in managing childcare said that the main problem was that they had no family members to help them. The second-most-prevalent difficulty was being unable to afford to hire private services (32%) while just 9% mentioned the lack of public services as a specific obstacle. This response pattern changed dramatically in the City of Buenos Aires, where 32% of respondents pointed to the lack of public services as their main difficulty while the inability to afford paid services ranked second (28%). The share who mentioned not having family members to help them was much smaller.
9 Women's participation in the labor market lags 22 percentage points behind men's, and this gender gap increases to 32 percentage points when the women have children to care for (Faur & Pereyra, 2018).
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age of five onward, when compulsory schooling laws means that the state must guarantee that sufficient school places are available. Before this point, access to childcare or early education facilities depends largely on the differences between regions (there is greater availability of such services in the City of Buenos Aires) or families' abilities to pay for them. Bearing in mind that over half the children in the country live in households that fall into the low socioeconomic stratum, it is clear that low levels of attendance at early education or care facilities during the earliest years of life have significant implications on the reproduction of social inequalities, as women who are responsible for caring for very young children have less opportunity to participate in activities outside the home (especially the labor market). In the case of dependent older adults, the most widespread alternative to family-based care is hiring paid services. Indeed, relatives and friends are the main care providers for dependent older adults from households in the low and medium socioeconomic groups while those from the high socioeconomic group delegate daily care to hired staff in 60% of cases. Given the limited availability of state-run care services and the increased tendency to outsource care for this segment of the population, the hiring of paid care staff is significant even among households from the low socioeconomic stratum, 20% of which do so. Although private institutions for long-term residential care are proliferating in Argentina, there is still no systematic information available through which to quantify this. In sum, the role of the state is more significant in relation to caring for children -although only from the age of five onward - but is extremely limited among dependent older adults, where it only extends to providing retirement pay and old-age pensions. The role of communityrun care services is limited for both children and the elderly. At the end of the day, the shortfall in state-run services is made up for by the market, but only for households that can afford this option. As a consequence, social class is a defining aspect of the way in which children and dependent adults are cared for and their access to services. The more financial resources available to a home, the more care is shared with other institutions or hired staff. Although this does not completely replace family care, it complements it by reducing the care burden and the amount of time spent on these activities. Childcare is privatized through access to private kindergartens and schools and also through the hiring of nannies and other domestic employees. These strategies may overlap, which increases both the class and gender divide, putting women from households in the high socioeconomic stratum in a relatively better position than their counterparts at the lower end of the spectrum. The limited perception of difficulties in providing care points to a naturalization of care provision by family members. However, this does not present itself in the same way for children and elderly, which reveals interesting differences in relation to the stage of life of the people being cared for. For children under the age of two, the difficulties perceived are insignificant. This is true despite the fact that alternatives for outsourcing childcare from family are very limited because of the lack of public care services and the brevity of maternity and paternity leave. This suggests that a widespread culture that assumes care for small children to be the mother's responsibility overlaps with the shortfalls in public policies that target this segment of the population. Among children aged three to four, when attendance at educational institutions is more accepted, as is the possibility of sharing family responsibilities with other institutions, mentions of difficulties in providing care increase notably among survey respondents, especially those from the high socioeconomic stratum. Such difficulties were mentioned most frequently in households that included women with higher levels of education and who thus had better chances of taking part in the labor market under favourable conditions.10 This situation also implies greater availability of financial resources that allow part of care work to be delegated (without this implying that all of the woman's
earnings need to be spent on outsourcing care services). The combination of these factors may lead to a weakening of maternalist ideas around the care of children of these ages in the highest socioeconomic stratum. Far more difficulties are perceived in relation to providing care for dependent older adults. Experiences around the world suggest that care for older family members is creating new social and economic tensions. The economic and emotional burden of care tends to fall on women, who are the ones who shoulder the physical and emotional costs of such care, which often overlaps with looking after their own children (Gascón & Redondo, 2014). In the absence of the maternalist mandate that suggests that mothers are -and should be - the best carers for their children, perceptions of difficulties increase. The types of difficulties that are reported are revealing in that they reflect the structure of possibilities for outsourcing care that each group can aspire to. In the country as a whole, the specific difficulty that is mentioned most in relation to childcare is “the lack of other family members to help.” In contrast, the lack of public childcare services is at the top of the list in the City of Buenos Aires, even though such services are far more available there than anywhere else in Argentina. Indeed, earlier studies, such as Faur (2014), have observed that women who live in areas with fewer public services are the least likely to see outsourcing care through educational institutions as being a possibility (and thus demand for these services is lower). With regard to care for the elderly, the difficulty mentioned most is the inability to afford such services. This reflects the reality of life for this population group, which is characterized by the absence of care provision on the part of the state and the frequency with which this is privatized. From a class perspective, the greater the possibilities of delegating care, the less the provision of care by family members is naturalized. This is true of both care for older adults and children and it points to how perceptions around who is responsible for care are constructed in dialogue with each household's real possibilities of accessing this. These, in turn, are shaped by public care policies, and deep-rooted cultural patterns also play an important part. Regardless, our culture tends to highlight certain moral stances in relation to care tasks: the “joys and burdens of care,” as Joan Tronto (2018) calls them, are perceived differently in relation to caring for children and older adults. The saccharine image of caring mothers reinforces this idea of joy while invisibilizing the burden of daily unpaid work. In relation to care for the elderly, once the overexaggerated figure of the mother is no longer a possible care provider, the real burdens of care become more evident. Final reflections By interlacing structural, cultural, and moral perspectives, this article has shown how different forms of social and political organization of care are reproduced in today's Argentina. This has become a major factor behind the reproduction of class and gender inequalities. In particular, the lack of public and accessible services to delegate care tends to retain women from low-income households (who cannot pay private solutions) within the boundaries of the domestic sphere. This results not only in a reduction of their possibilities of independence and personal fulfillment but also curtails their possibilities of improving both their personal economic situation and that of their households, through participation in remunerated labor. To revert this trend, there 10 In fact, mothers of children aged three to four from the high socio-economic stratum exhibit an activity rate of 87,3% whereas among their counterparts from the low socioeconomic stratum the activity rate is 53,5%. Seen from another point of view, mothers of children aged three to four who participate in the labor market show significantly higher educational credential than those of mothers who do not take part in the labor market (almost 40% have completed tertiary of university studies versus 15% among their inactive counterparts).
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needs to be a public commitment to providing care for early childhood and dependent older people. Public policies around care are especially important in this regard. In particular, the form that these take has very significant gender-related repercussions: they may continue to confine women to the role of caregivers (in keeping with traditional ideas of femininity and maternity) or the provision of care services can “socialize” the costs of care and open up options for women to participate in the labor market and the public sphere as a whole (Razavi, 2007). Access to free state or community-run care services is a key mechanism for families to be able to create a stable balance between time and space for work and family life in a way that is not dependent on the financial circumstances of the families in question, the gender of their members, or the region of the country where they lived. Prioritizing this issue within the political agenda implies recognizing care as being not a personal problem but a public one that has serious implications on the well-being of the population and thus on the possibilities of creating a more equal society.
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Funding This work was supported by a joint grant from the National Council of Scientific and Technical Research (CONICET) and the Universidad Nacional General Sarmiento in Argentina (grant number: PIO-CONICET 14420140100015CO). The data analysis process also benefited from funding from the Research Program on Contemporary Argentinean Society (PISAC) and the International Center for Development and Decent Work at Kassel University. References Amarante, V., Colacce, M., & Tenembaum, V. (2017). National care system in Uruguay, working paper 2/2017, World Institute for Development Economics Research. Helsinki: United Nations University. Batthyánny, K. (2015). Las políticas y el cuidado en América Latina. Una mirada a las experiencias regionales. Santiago de Chile: Cepal - Aecid. 10 December www.repositorio. cepal.org. Benería, L. (1979). Reproduction, production and the sexual división of labour. Cambridge Journal of Economics, 3(3), 203–225.
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