Who should care for whom and under which conditions? Gender analysis of care regimes and family policy

Abstract

The question of who bears the responsibility of care for family dependents has become central to contemporary analytical approaches to the welfare state. Conceptualising care as an analytical category has been seen to contribute to contemporary debates about relations between subjects, the family, the market and the state. This article carries out a gender analysis of care regimes and family policy based on existing scholarly literature, looking at concrete aspects of state welfare including the shaping of social care, and the ways in which responsibility for childcare is divided between different actors and services under state welfare regimes. To that end, several care regimes are analysed, giving examples of direct and indirect measures of support for families. Normative understandings of what constitutes ‘good care’ are also discussed, in addition to gendered aspects of care and the social status of care subjects. The development of policy in this area is shown to reflect basic trends of development of welfare state systems in Western Europe.

The author demonstrates that a gender analysis of care regimes allows for a more in-depth appreciation of the complex issue of family policy. Based on the literature, the article sets out a classification of care regimes as a response to the ‘care deficit’ in Western societies. This comprises ‘etatization’, or the duty of care as taken on by the state as seen in Scandinavian countries; ‘privatization’, as seen in countries following a liberal model of family policy, where care has often been considered a ‘state-free zone’; and the ‘marketization’ of care, as seen in countries with a more conservative family policy such as Germany, where the third sector plays a more significant role in care. The results of the analysis reveal that the main factors affecting the redistribution of care between various social actors and institutions are governmental responses to care needs, the redefining of gendered divisions of labour, changes with regard to localization, and finally the status of social care in society as a whole.