Earner–carer Model

Earner–Carer Model Definition

The earner–carer model is a fundamentally gender-egalitarian approach to the welfare state, which assumes that men and women engage equally in both caregiving and paid employment (Gornick and Meyers 2003). Welfare state structures always rest on gendered assumptions about men’s and women’s roles in family and workplace; through social policy, such gender ideologies both reflect and reinforce the supposed roles of men and women as citizens, workers, and carers.

The Male Breadwinner Inheritance

The dominant vision of the Western welfare state during the twentieth century was the “male breadwinner–female caregiver” or “family wage” model (Sainsbury 1999). Families were presumed to consist of a man working outside the home, a woman providing care within it, and children; the model required men to earn a wage large enough to support the whole family, with the welfare state intervening only to replace the breadwinner’s wage in cases of unemployment, disability, sickness, or old age — or occasionally to support women’s caretaking at home (Fraser 1994). By the late twentieth century it was clear that this model — never accurate for most working-class and poor families — was untenable even for the middle class: few jobs pay enough to support an entire family, and most women are now labor market participants (Crompton 1999).

Three Successor Models

Scholars propose three main replacements. The universal breadwinner model — Crompton’s “dual earner/state carer” or “dual earner/marketized carer” — envisions men and women equally invested in paid work, with the state eliminating gender differences by drawing women into employment. It requires workplace reforms to equalize opportunity, state or market provision of childcare, eldercare, and other services, and high-quality full-time jobs with full social insurance for women, so that women are freed for employment. The caregiver parity model instead values and rewards women’s care: recognizing gender difference, it seeks to make women’s distinctive employment patterns costless, through generous caregiver allowances supporting informal carework and workplace reforms such as parental leave and flextime, keeping the family — not state or market — the primary site of care.

The Earner–Carer Alternative

The earner–carer model rejects both strategies. In this vision, men and women alike balance informal carework and labor-force participation: feminists pursue a strategy encouraging men’s lives to resemble women’s more closely, while social institutions adjust to workers who specialize in neither formal work nor informal care but engage in both. All jobs would presume workers who are simultaneously earners and carers, with shorter workweeks and employment-enabling services. Unlike the universal breadwinner strategy, care is assumed to take place both inside and outside households; unlike caregiver parity, the model aims to break down gendered norms of care and employment altogether (Fraser 1994; Crompton 1999; Gornick and Meyers 2003).

Implementation in Practice

The model has proved difficult to institute. Despite efforts toward flexible combinations of employment and care in Norway and Sweden, gendered patterns persist (Ellingsaeter 1999; Sainsbury 1999). Yet as Sainsbury observes, the lack of far-reaching change “should not blind us to the merits of policy construction which integrates market work and care work in the home and simultaneously grants equal entitlement to men and women.”