Women carry the burden of caregiving, studies show

By Made­line Pap­cun | UConn Jour­nal­ism
April 2024

While the sto­ries I col­lect­ed from women jour­nal­ists are anec­do­tal, there is aca­d­e­m­ic research to back up their per­son­al expe­ri­ences in bal­anc­ing a jour­nal­ism career with care­giv­ing respon­si­bil­i­ties.

As explained in the 2016 book, “Care­giv­ing in the Ill­ness Con­text,” care­giv­ing is tra­di­tion­al­ly seen as “women’s work”in the Unit­ed States. The idea stems back to the his­tor­i­cal con­text of car­ing for ill fam­i­ly mem­bers being an expect­ed role for women, with­in the pri­va­cy of the fam­i­ly. The same chap­ter argues this sit­u­a­tion for women remains true today despite a more flex­i­ble shar­ing of house­hold tasks by men and women in West­ern soci­eties. 

Strides have been made toward gen­der equal­i­ty in the Unit­ed States, yet the patri­archy remains strong, and gen­der social­iza­tion still leads the gen­er­al pop­u­la­tion to con­form to tra­di­tion­al gen­der roles. This places an over­whelm­ing care­giv­ing bur­den on women. 

Kather­ine Gold­stein is a dig­i­tal jour­nal­ist and con­sul­tant focus­ing on issues of women and work, and is also a moth­er of three. 

Though she’s been a jour­nal­ist for about 15 years, she’s worked for her­self as a free­lancer for the last eight years. Gold­stein has not worked full-time for a news orga­ni­za­tion since ear­ly 2016, a change which was spurred after the birth of her first son. 

“I had a real­ly dif­fi­cult expe­ri­ence when my first son was born,” Gold­stein said on a video call in Feb­ru­ary of 2024. “He had health prob­lems and was hos­pi­tal­ized after he was born.” 

Her return to work when her son was three months old was, “a dis­as­ter on many lev­els.” 

“I got fired when he was six months old and that real­ly set me off on sort of an exis­ten­tial cri­sis,” Gold­stein said. “My iden­ti­ty was real­ly staked in being a com­pe­tent, suc­cess­ful pro­fes­sion­al and I did not know how to rec­on­cile what was hap­pen­ing to me pro­fes­sion­al­ly and also becom­ing a moth­er.” 

Though los­ing her job was the result of a “com­plex sit­u­a­tion,” Gold­stein not­ed that her job was an “extreme­ly dif­fi­cult envi­ron­ment to be a new mom in,” espe­cial­ly since she was the only per­son who had a child on her team. 

Since then, Gold­stein was named a 2017 Har­vard Nie­man Jour­nal­ism Fel­low. In her 2017 piece for Nie­man Reports “Where are the Moth­ers?,” she eval­u­at­ed the news industry’s need to meet the needs of par­ents and cre­ate a bet­ter work-life bal­ance. 

Gold­stein explained that a 2015 Uni­ver­si­ty of Kansas study found that female jour­nal­ists face a high­er risk of burnout and typ­i­cal­ly have more plans to leave the indus­try than their male coun­ter­parts. Much of this is due to feel­ing unsup­port­ed by their orga­ni­za­tions and desires to bal­ance work and fam­i­ly life. 

The 2015 study found that 67% of the women sur­veyed said they either intend­ed to leave jour­nal­ism or were uncer­tain about their future, com­pared to 55% of men sur­veyed who said the same. 

Researchers who ana­lyzed the num­bers using gen­der social­iza­tion the­o­ry — which posits that soci­ety puts expec­ta­tions on peo­ple based on their gen­der from a very young age —  found their find­ings sup­port­ed. In par­tic­u­lar, women are expect­ed to pro­vide the major­i­ty of fam­i­ly care and raise chil­dren, while men are expect­ed to be bread­win­ners and pri­or­i­tize work over the fam­i­ly. The sur­vey results sup­port­ed this, show­ing sig­nif­i­cant­ly high­er rates of role over­load for women. 

Women make up about two-thirds of grad­u­ates in jour­nal­ism or mass com­mu­ni­ca­tions pro­grams, yet the media indus­try is just one-third women. Gold­stein attrib­uted this dis­par­i­ty in her “Where Are the Moth­ers?” piece at least par­tial­ly to the jour­nal­ism industry’s fail­ure to retain moth­ers. 

The fact that this is a prob­lem on a grand scale is trou­bling for the news indus­try over­all, but can be a com­fort to the indi­vid­ual strug­gling with the same issue, Gold­stein said. 

“I real­ly felt like I was a per­son­al fail­ure and that every­one else had being a work­ing mom fig­ured out except for me, and I was per­son­al­ly defec­tive,” Gold­stein said of her 2016 depar­ture from the tra­di­tion­al news­room.  

“But as I did more and more research  about the larg­er social issues fac­ing moth­ers, I start­ed to real­ly feel like I was not a fail­ure,” she said.