The Double Responsibilities of Care in East Asia: Emerging New Social Risks of Women Providing both Elderly Care and Childcare

The objective of this research is to examine the reality of women facing the ‘double responsibility of care’; the reality of women having to simultaneously provide elderly and childcare, a problem which has emerged in the context of the tendency toward late marriage and childbirth, extreme low birth rate, and extreme aging society in East Asia, along with the limitations of policy related therewith. Against such socio-economic background, we have been conducting both quantitative and qualitative research in order to enhance our understanding of new social risk related to the double responsibility of elderly care and childcare as well as attempting to propose measures to deal with these issues. Based on the results of questionnaire surveys and in-depth interviews in suburban and urban cities, this project aims to enhance our understanding of women’s experience of double responsibility of care, and examine the new structure of social risk involved in such issues.