Key Findings

Despite the bitter divisions between U.S. political parties in recent years, people in the United States are largely united in their support for family, their belief in the value of caregiving, and their need for paid family and medical leave. This report provides key findings on partisanship, care, and paid family and medical leave collected from a nationally representative survey conducted by Better Life Lab at New America and NORC at the University of Chicago. Even on questions of gender equality around caregiving—the idea that men and women should be and are both responsible for family care—there was significant overlap. Counter to the dominant narrative of political polarization, both Democrats and Republicans show widespread support for family caregiving, support for men as involved caregivers, and report needing resources to help families balance work and care, albeit with a few differences in attitudes and opinions more likely to break along party lines. This data suggests broad support across the electorate for lawmakers and candidates for office across party lines to put care and gender-equal care-supportive policies at the center of their political agendas.

Among the study’s key findings are:

1. Democrats and Republicans experience work-care conflict.

• Regardless of gender and party, more than two-thirds (68–70 percent) of caregivers among our respondents said they were employed while providing care assistance. Among caregivers who worked while providing care, over two-thirds (64–71 percent) said they had at some point missed work to provide assistance. Among caregivers who are no longer working, over half of Democrats and Republicans (54 percent and 53 percent, respectively) said they left the workforce or retired early to provide care. Many can’t afford to miss work to provide care, yet are faced with no choice but to care for their families anyway and cobble together time and money on their own.

2. Across party lines, large majorities of people agree parents should share care responsibilities equally.

• While Democrats were more likely than Republicans to say that parents of both genders should share caregiving responsibilities equally, the difference is only 7 percentage points, and the vast majority of both groups (92 percent of Democrats and 87 percent of Republicans) agreed with that statement. However, Republicans are more likely than Democrats to think that the genders should have different roles in care, even if they share equally in overall responsibility. Just over half of Republicans (51 percent) and a third of Democrats (37 percent) agreed that “men and women are equally responsible to care for their families, but men’s role should be financial support, while women should run the household.” Republican men and women were equally likely to agree with this gendered division of roles, but there was a 6 percentage point difference between Democratic men (40 percent agreed) and women (34 percent agreed).

3. There were no differences by party affiliation on who has taken leave to care for an adult or child.

• In our nationally representative sample a quarter of all men (25 percent), and almost a third of all women (31 percent) have taken leave to care for an adult, with no differences by party. Over half of all parents have taken leave to care for a child (48 percent of men, and 55 percent of women), with no differences by party as well.

4. About half of employed Democrats and Republicans did not have access to paid family and medical leave.

• Republicans and Democrats were just as likely to have taken leave to care for a family member or newborn in the past, though Democrats were more likely than Republicans to say they anticipate leave in the future (a difference of 7 to 8 percentage points).

5. Men take leave from work when others in their lives need care chiefly because it is the right thing to do.

• Democrats and Republicans were overwhelmingly united in the belief men take leave because it’s the right thing to do for their families (62 percent and 60 percent agreed, respectively). Over 50 percent of respondents from both parties also agreed that men take leave because their spouse or partner supports them in doing so. Democrats were more likely than Republicans (47 percent versus 38 percent, respectively) to say that their partner needing or wanting to continue working is a major reason men take leave.

6. Men don’t take leave to care for others because they can’t afford it.

• Republicans and Democrats are even more united in the belief that the main reason men do not take paid leave to care for others is because they cannot afford to (72 percent and 74 percent agree, respectively). Being seen as manly, or adhering to traditional gender norms of men as distant breadwinners, was the least common answer for why men don’t take leave (only 18 percent of Republicans and 26 percent of Democrats agree). This suggests that economic factors influence men’s decisions not to take leave to provide care more than gender norms do.
• One reason men feel they cannot afford to take leave to care for others is that they see men experiencing negative repercussions at work when they take leave. Almost half of Democrats (46 percent), over a third of Republicans (38 percent), and nearly a third of Independents (32 percent) agree that men are less likely to take leave because they see other men being penalized for taking leave.