Convenors: Ricardo Rodrigues (European Centre for Social Welfare Policy and Research) and Susan Phillips (Queen’s University Faculty of Health Sciences)

Socially mediated definitions of time spent care giving and receiving are deeply gendered. Thus far only limited consideration has been given in the care literature to intersecting social characteristics of gender and social location (e.g. socioeconomic position, geographical location, etc.). Intersectionality, understood here as overlapping categorizations and (dis)advantages, is at the core of the FutureGEN project, whose broader aim is to analyse gender inequalities in health and care from a cohort perspective. This symposium brings together papers that address intersectionality in care needs (e.g. disability) and in care giving and receiving in old-age, therefore appealing to an audience that encompasses care and health scholars. The time dimension is incorporated both in terms of time needed for care and historical time, through cohort analysis. The first paper (lead author: Susan Phillips, Queen’s University) titled “Systematic review of methods used to study the intersecting impact of sex and social locations on health outcomes” sets the scene for the relevance of intersectionality by discussing methods to address intersectionality in quantitative research, with applications beyond health and care for older people. The paper titled “Sex, ageing and disabilities: cohort trajectories of functional decline among older adults in Europe 2004-2017”, (lead author: Stefan Fors, Karolinska Institute) uses quantitative methods to show how disabilities in later life in cohorts of women and men have evolved between 2004 and 2017 across geographical locations. This is followed by a paper titled “Gender differences in access to community-based caring resources in old age: An examination of the effects of widowhood and living arrangements” focusing on the impact of widowhood on use of care for women and men of different socioeconomic backgrounds (lead author: Stefania Ilinca, European Centre for Social Welfare Policy and Research). The symposium concludes with the paper titled “Caregiving across European cohorts between 2004-2015: is there evidence of changing gender patterns across care regimes?”, which analyses evolving gender differences in caregiving across different geographic locations (lead author: Ricardo Rodrigues, European Centre for Social Welfare Policy and Research). In addition, we plan to have Prof. Francesca Bettio (University of Siena) as an external discussant for this Symposium.