Gender and family caregiving at the end-of-life in the context of old age: A systematic review

Abstract

Palliative family caregiving for older adults is gendered. Gender affects why people care and the consequences of providing care. Palliative care literature needs to incorporate a greater gender focus for future research and policy makers need to be aware of the gendered ramifications of providing more palliative care in the community.

“Charity Begins at Home”: Informal Caring Barriers to Formal Volunteering Among Older People

“…Role identity was especially evident in the present study in the case of child minding and eldercare, where many of the participants saw their contributions as being a more or less automatic aspect of their social role as grandparent or child, respectively. This outcome reflects the perceived obligatory nature of many informal volunteering and caring roles that makes their enactment an assumed aspect of individuals' lives (Hank and Stuck, 2008;Morgan et al, 2016).…”

“…Caring duties are typically considered more obligatory than formal volunteering activities (Hank and Stuck, 2008), and can be especially physically and mentally taxing (Morgan et al, 2016). There tend to be greater societal expectations that women will perform caring roles (Horrell et al, 2015), potentially meaning that women are more likely to experience any negative effects of caring and are less likely to obtain the positive benefits of formal volunteering due to their caring commitments.…”

“Self-Employed” in Caregivinghood: The Contribution of Swedish Informal Caregivers’ Environmental and Contextual Resistance Resources and Deficits

“…Caregiving research has also emerged from new geographical areas, including Japan [36,62,63], Taiwan [64], China [48,55], and so-called developing countries [65][66][67]. Gender aspects have been granted specific attention, such as the male caregiver experience [59,66,[68][69][70][71][72] as well as issues related to relationships with spouses [44,73,74] and adult children caring for aging parents [62,75].…”

Caregiving, ethnicity and gender in Māori and non‐Māori New Zealanders of advanced age: Findings from LiLACS NZ Kaiāwhina (Love and Support) study

“…The research literature emphasises the psychosocial nature of informal caregiving, “characterised by relationships and social expectations” (p.4) . Sex differences in informal caregiving have been identified, but not adequately investigated, especially in relation to the social expectations that place a disproportionate load of caring on female spouses and daughters of ageing parents . Ethnicity differences in informal caregiving and its impacts are less explored.…”

“…3 Sex differences in informal caregiving have been identified, but not adequately investigated, especially in relation to the social expectations that place a disproportionate load of caring on female spouses and daughters of ageing parents. 8,9 Ethnicity differences in informal caregiving and its impacts are less explored. There are well-recognised differences around family relationships, duties and obligations, ageing, illness and death in different cultures.…”