Informal care often puts a brake on wages and careers, especially for women

This article was last updated on July 1, 2024

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Informal care often puts a brake on wages and careers, especially for women

Informal caregivers have a lower hourly wage than colleagues who do not provide informal care. They are also less satisfied with their work. This is evident from research by Radboud University.

People who work less because of informal care not only see their monthly salary decrease. Their hourly wages also increase less rapidly than those of colleagues who do not provide informal care, but are in the same stage of life and do the same work. For the research figures on informal care were compared with CBS figures on how hourly wages of Dutch people develop during their career.

Caring for a parent, child, friend or neighbor for a long time usually has no positive effect on the further course of your career. “Informal caregivers not only have a lower hourly wage on average, wages also grow less quickly and informal caregivers have lower job satisfaction,” says sociologist Klara Raiber, who will present her research tomorrow.

‘Daddy bonus’

Women in particular lose income when they start providing informal care. Strikingly enough, men often receive a little extra hourly wage when they start providing informal care. “Intensive caregiving benefits men’s wage growth, but not women’s,” says Raiber. It also appears that if informal care lasts longer, this has a more negative effect on the wages of women than on those of men.

The researcher does not have a precise explanation, but she does point to a previously discovered phenomenon: the ‘daddy bonus’. A man who has children or cares for declining parents is more often seen by the boss as a man with life experience. For women, this experience or skill is taken for granted.

Despite this bonus for fathers, informal care still has a negative effect on hourly wages on average. Women provide informal care more often and for longer periods than men. This often involves more than one person, while for men it is usually limited to caring for one person.