Old age care policies: Gendering institutional arrangements across countries

Abstract

Demographic changes have put old age care on the political agenda in many healthcare states across industrialized countries. From a gender perspective this is interesting as women dominate caregiving in old age care. Further, the policy problem of old age care is characterized by strongly gendered framing and enactment, although there are interesting variations across countries. Old age care is a new and pressing issue in health policy with important gender implications, but which is neglected in the literature on health policy. This chapter focuses on old age care policies, which are situated between the public and the private sphere and between the worlds of formal and informal care. More specifically, the chapter adopts an institutionalist (see, for example, Thelen, 1999; 2003) and cross-country comparative perspective to analyse the policies and politics of organizational reform in old age care services. It examines the particular configurations of gendered institutions at play and how these configurations impact on the substance of organizational reform (see also Chapter 18 by Barry et al.).