Gender bias in public long-term care? A survey experiment among care managers

Daughters of elderly women are more likely to provide informal care than sons. If care managers take this into account and view informal care as a substitute for formal care, they will statistically discriminate against the mothers of daughters. Using a survey experiment among professional needs assessors for long-term care services in Norway, we find that if a woman with a daughter had a son instead, she would receive 34 percent more formal care. On the other hand, daughters do not provide more care for fathers. Correspondingly, we find no effect of child gender for fathers in the experiment.