The core activities of the project related to fieldwork, through in-depth interviews of male caregivers in Tokyo and Paris. This was complemented by analysis of institutional conditions, in particular in relation to gender, including interviews of key stakeholders. The understanding of each research site, from a view of men’s perspectives to broad social and policy conditions, formed the base for a comparative perspective. The research benefited from testing and refining findings and insights through interaction with scholars expert on each research site as well as scholars engaged more broadly on issues of ageing in society, enabled by CAREANDWORK comprising hosting at Sciences Po, visits to University of Tokyo, and secondment to The Oxford Institute of Population Ageing, University of Oxford.
CAREANDWORK addressed how and why gender affects male family caregivers choices of care practices, and how such men sustain their well-being while reconciling work and care for their parents. CAREANDWORK evidenced that men select care practices with priority given to familiar tasks deemed appropriately masculine. To perform care as they deem to be appropriate, such men approach care as they do their work: they ‘work-nise’ care. Such a gendered approach to care practices has important implications for addressing gender in public interventions, as often the implicit assumption is of female caregivers.
An important connection between the choices of such male caregivers and their broader social context are policies aimed at enabling work to be compatible with care provision. CAREANDWORK leveraged recent changes in Japan, in particular the government’s, Japanese Business Federation’s, and large member firms’ initiatives to roll-out family caregiving policy. The aims, approaches and use of such policies were juxtaposed to the perspectives of employed male family carers. CAREANDWORK provides ethnographic evidence portraying diverse ways in which men engaged with care for aged relatives, pointing to strongly held views of care provision being a private issue. CAREANDWORK finds a disjuncture between the government’s attempt to make family care provision a social issue through achieving broader participation of employed family members in care, and the perspectives of businesses, including tacit reluctance to transform working practices to accommodate care, and employees, who view care as a family issue. This results in employed men’s devotion to work competing with the notion that carers should be devoted to care provision. For some, devotion to family caregiving displaces devotion to work, leading to significant financial and health issues. Whereas in Japan, for such men care for aged parents is part of a reciprocal relationship in return for care they received as children, in France, in contrast, such men report a much less marked sense of equivalent reciprocity. Whereas they may feel responsibility for care for parents, this does not come with a sense of needing for themselves to be implicated in care provision. CAREANDWORK contributed a perspective on transfer of learning across countries through understanding how and why different aspects of care and work systems develop and interact, by addressing the interplay between broader social and cultural conditions, specific stakeholders characteristics, and individual perspectives.
