Women leave the workforce at a higher rate than men to provide care to the country’s aging population, according to a new report from Wells Fargo.

This phenomenon puts a strain on labor force growth and negatively contributes to women’s lifetime earnings.

“The direct challenge of an aging demographic is obviously that there’s less of a working-age population,” Shannon Grein, a macroeconomist at Wells Fargo and one of the authors of this study told the Business Record. “The indirect challenge is that as we have more and more of the population growing older, those people require care that could drive more working people out of the labor market, particularly women.”

The report, published in recognition of Women’s History Month, highlights the role women play in providing both unpaid and paid eldercare. A few key takeaways are:

1. As is the case with child care, women take on the majority of unpaid eldercare.

Eldercare needs in the U.S. have never been greater. The U.S. Census Bureau projects an additional 1.7 million seniors will need care within the next decade.

Despite the increasing need, the cost of care remains prohibitively expensive for many families, who instead opt to take on the responsibilities themselves.

Researchers found that women accounted for 59% of unpaid caregivers for older family members, performing nearly four hours a day of unpaid care between 2021-2022. The value of this labor is worth roughly $113 billion, according to the report.

“The responsibility of child care tends to fall disproportionately on women,” Grein said, citing a 2022 study from Wells Fargo. “But there is this other responsibility that hits them later in life, and that is elder care. Whether it’s parents or loved ones, it just primarily falls on women more than men.”

2. Women over 55 take on more unpaid and paid care.

Women ages 55 and up take on a disproportionate amount of eldercare, something that came as a surprise to researchers.

This group represented 28% of all unpaid elder care providers in 2021-2022, compared with only 18% of men in the same age group, according to the report.

“When you’re in your 30s, or maybe younger, you might have to step out for child care,” Grein said. “Then in your mid-to-late 50s, you might step out for eldercare. Women are really getting hit on both ends of their age spectrum.”

Women ages 55 and up are also more likely to take on paid elder care, making up 27% of the workforce in health care support positions – that’s roughly 2.5 times more than their share in the labor force as a whole, and nearly 10 times above the share of men in the same jobs.

While the U.S. Department of Labor projects that job growth in health care support will increase by 22% in the next decade, the report highlights that these jobs typically pay less compared with the traditionally female-dominated jobs older women would have.

3. The burden of unpaid care limits women’s earnings and businesses’ ability to hire.

Despite an increasing number of paid opportunities, the demands on women to provide unpaid eldercare hinders their ability to take advantage of them.

Nearly 2 million women over the age of 55 had to leave the labor force due to family obligations in 2023, which is seven times the number of men in the same group.

“If you’re working less in general, you have less capacity to save, and that also dents your Social Security income once you retire,” Grein said. “It dents the financial position of half the population.”

According to the report, when a woman leaves the workforce, her earnings take a hit. For many families, that means the next time a family member needs care, the person making less money, typically a woman, will step out of the workforce again.

This cycle “strong-arms women into career breaks or into entering into lower paid positions, because they tend to offer more flexibility,” Grein said.

Women’s disproportionate role in elder care has gotten less attention than other challenges to women’s labor force participation, according to Grein. But there are ways employers can help ease these burdens.

“In a time when labor is likely going to be in short supply because of the aging dynamics, if you’re able to offer flexibility, you might have a leg up,” Grein said. “Anything you can do to differentiate yourself can attract workers.”