AbstractsSociology

In Canada, an increase in life expectancy and a policy shift regarding community care have probably led to an increase in the number of people who provide care without pay to family members, relatives or friends. The increasing involvement of women in the labour force has raised concerns about their availability to provide care and has informed research on the relationship between caregiving and employment. Since most of the research in this area focuses on women, it is unclear whether traditional gender differences in the division of paid and unpaid labour influence the impact of caregiving on employment trajectories. Several factors, which remain poorly understood, can be invoked to account for the effect of providing care on employment. For instance, likely to influence individuals' employment transitions are the nature of the relationship with the care recipient, the combining of care with full-time versus part-time employment, the simultaneous provision of care to aging parents and young children, as well as the duration of caregiving.The first chapter of this thesis offers a description of caregiving in the population. The retrospective caregiving history collected in the 2007 General Social Survey (GSS) is used to document the proportion of Canadian men and women aged 45 years and over who have ever provided care since the age of 15, the number of people that they helped and their relationship with the care recipients. Using life tables, we confirm an upward trend in caregiving across birth cohorts. Unexpectedly, the findings also show that the provision of care starts at earlier ages in more recent cohorts – a result that appears partly linked to the emergence of new care relationships – and that the gender gap in the provision of care has widened over time.The objective of the second chapter is to examine the effects of the provision of care on individuals' employment trajectories when care is combined with an employment of varying intensity or with childcare responsibilities. Using proportional hazards models applied to the 2006 and 2007 GSS data, it assesses the impact of providing care to a partner, a parent or parent-in-law, another relative or a non-relative on the risk of leaving employment. The analysis shows that providing care to a parent or parent-in-law increases the probability of leaving employment only among women employed full-time and among men and women who have no children or only adult children.The third chapter seeks to discern the impact of providing care on two competing transitions out of full-time employment: leaving employment or transitioning into part-time paid work. Using the 2006 and 2007 GSS data, competing risks models support the idea that women's employment is more likely to be influenced by the provision of care than that of men, given their lower attachment to the labour force. Full-time employed women see their risk of leaving employment increase with parent care. In contrast, men who provide such care are likely to remain employed but to opt for part-time employment in…