Wives, mothers and now daughters: the gender impact of the increasing demand for elderly care in Ireland and Italy

At the level of political economy, care is an increasingly feminised space where women predominate as formal and informal providers. The intersection of age and gender in this space, is ripe for empirical study. Like many aspects of intersectionality identified by feminists, discussion remains ‘largely at a normative level, while empirical evidence is still scarce’ (Lombardo and Verloo; 2009: 116). In this view, this paper aims to investigate the social and gender equality underpinnings of elderly care policy in Ireland and Italy. These countries have generally been described as belonging to a familialistic and residual welfare state model. Nevertheless, in the field of care more generally, and elderly care in particular, we see different organizing principles at work. Although both countries have traditionally heavily relied on informal family care, recent developments point at the increased relevance of private companies and multinationals as providers of institutional care in Ireland, while in Italy the lack of direct state intervention has promoted the expansions of a grey care market based on domestic work and female migration. After describing the institutional context and underlying principles of elderly care in the two countries, this paper sheds light on the differential ways in which elderly care is associated with gender and other social divisions in the two countries by analyzing the process of policy implementation at the local level and focusing on who does what and when in relation to the care need of the elderly. This analyses sets the scene for further case studies aimed at giving voice to those directly implicated in the caring economy (givers and receivers of care, mostly women).