Why is Caregiving a Feminist Issue?
The issues that caregivers face in the United States deserve our attention. Of the professional caregivers in the U.S., 90 percent are women, and of the informal caregivers, up to 75 percent are women. Caregiving is a feminist issue because it overwhelmingly affects women, both as caregivers, and as those likely to need care because women are a majority of the very elderly. While women have made impressive gains in other aspects of society, we still work to find equity in the distribution of family care work between genders. While this dynamic is slowly changing, particularly as men find themselves cast in the role of caregiver for aging parents or an ill partner, the bulk of the nation’s care work is still performed by women. The lack of perception of care work as valuable work contributes to this inequity and needs to be adjusted from the persistent norm – that family care work is still categorized as less important than market work and therefore those who allocate significant portio
