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We examine the relative pay of occupations involving care, such as teaching, counseling, providing health services, or supervising children. We use panel data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. Care work pays less than other occupations, after controlling for the education and employment experience of the workers, many job characteristics, and (via individual fixed effects) unmeasured, stable characteristics of those who hold the jobs. Both men and women in care work pay this wage penalty. However, the penalty is paid disproportionately by women since more women than men do this kind of work.

The connections between the world of money and profit and the world of care and concern are of great importance to society. Traditionally, the "public" world of markets and government was the realm of men, while the "private" realm of family and social relationships was entrusted to women. While some of women's tasks were largely instrumental-cleaning and cooking, for example-many tasks contained more personalized and emotional components. Women were in charge of children, elderly, and the ill; maintaining personal relationships; offering emotional support, personal attention, and listening; embodying (or so it was understood) sexuality. This social contract is changing. As women move increasingly into the world of paid work, many of these traditional intimate tasks are being performed in relationships that include the explicit movement of money. Paid child care, nursing homes for the elderly, talk therapy and phone sex are just a few examples. What are economists to make of this trend?This essay analyzes the consequences of this mixing of realms of "love" and "money" for economic analysis, societal well-being, and public policy. We document the empirical magnitudes of the shifts from nonmarket to market time use, with an eye to their gender dimensions and implications for economic theory. On a more philosophical note, we point out that most current intellectual conceptualizations of these economic issues are inadequate. Whether commentators celebrate the movement to the market or bemoan it, the use of unexamined assumptions and outdated rhetoric is endemic to the literature. An a priori judgment that markets must improve caregiving by increasing efficiency puts the brakes on intelligent research, rather than encouraging it. Likewise, an

How should “care” be defined and measured in ways that enhance our understanding of the impact of economic development on women? This paper addresses this question, suggesting several possible approaches to the development of indices that would measure gender differences in responsibility for the financial and temporal care of dependents.Gender, Care, Empowerment, Dependents, Unpaid work, Time use,

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This paper puts recent feminist theorizing about “care” within an economic context by developing the concept of caring labor and exploring possible reasons for its undervaluation. It describes the relevance of tensions between neoclassical and institutionalist thought, as well as between pro-market and anti-market views. The final section explores the implications for feminist public policy.Caring, labor, family, policy, altruism, reciprocity,

We argue that previous research on time devoted to child care has devoted insufficient attention to the definition and conceptualization of care time. Three separate problems are evident. First, the conventional focus on explicit activities with children distracts attention from the larger responsibilities of "passive" care, which ranges from time when children are sleeping to time when they are in the same room but not engaged in an activity with parents. Second, empirical analysis of activity time focuses almost exclusively on parents, overlooking the role of relatives In intellectual exchange, as in properly economic transactions, numbers are the medium through which dissimilar desires, needs, and expectations are somehow made commensurable. Theodore Porter, Trust in NumbersHow much family time is devoted to the care of children in the U.S.? An accurate answer to this question could help quantify the adult effort devoted to the production of the next generation. It could also help explain why children living with single parents seem disadvantaged relative to their counterparts in two-parent households (McLanahan and Sandefur 1994). Largescale diary-based surveys are providing more and more numbers about time use. But the validity of these numbers rests on typologies and taxonomies of care that deserve closer attention than they have yet received (Bailey 1994).Most time diary surveys ask adults about their participation in activities with children, overlooking the demands of supervisory time, or "passive care." Survey designs typically focus on parents or family members living in the same household, rather than the total amount of unpaid care provided by family members (including those living in different households).Measures of active care ignore the issue of overlap, treating an hour of adult care time the same whether it is accompanied by other adults or devoted to one or more children.In this paper, we utilize the unique features of a child-based survey, the 1997 Child 4 Development Supplement of the Panel Survey of Income Dynamics (PSID-CDS), to explain these shortcomings and develop better measures of family care time devoted to children in the U.S. in 1997. We begin with a discussion of how childcare has been conceptualized that includes a review of recent research on time-diary data from nationally representative samples of the U.S. population. We offer a descriptive analysis of children's time use based on the PSID-CDS, developing a new typology of passive and active care time. We show how the data on active care time can be corrected for overlaps, and also develop an overall measure of "care density" that is relevant to considerations of the quantity, quality and cost of family time devoted to children. We use multivariate analysis to illustrate the impact of alternative definitions on estimated differences in active family care time between children in one and two-parent families. CONCEPTUALIZING CHILD CARE TIMEThe gold standard of time use data is the diary method, which asks respondents to...

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