The “Daughterhood Penalty” in America’s Caregiving Crisis

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: Next, the daughterhood penalty, a growing social issue that’s too often overlooked. Journalist and author Kelli María Korducki explores the disproportionate financial, emotional, and professional burden that’s falling on women who are caring for their aging parents. And she joins Michel Martin to discuss the failures of America’s care system amid a rapidly aging society.

 

MICHEL MARTIN: Kelli María Korducki, thank you so much for talking with us. 

 

KELLI MARIA KORDUCKI: Thank you so much for having me.

 

MARTIN: You’ve been writing about something called the daughterhood penalty. What is the daughterhood penalty?

 

KORDUCKI: Yeah, well, the daughterhood penalty is the kind of unspoken tax that often falls onto adult daughters of aging parents who make sacrifices — career sacrifices, time sacrifices — to care for their parents and to provide unpaid care. And yeah, that adds up to lost earning opportunities.

 

MARTIN: You actually give a number. You say that on average…you call it the millennial daughter tax, it’s on average women are losing out on $300,000 on average of savings over their lifetimes, over their sort of career lifetimes because of this daughterhood penalty. I mean, that’s, that’s crazy. Why is that?

 

KORDUCKI: Well, it’s pretty simple. The amount of time that it takes to be available to show up and to attend to a progressively declining elderly person, it ends up eating into other responsibilities. You know, there’s only so much time in which to attend to various responsibilities in one’s life. And often it’s the career that ends up taking a hit. 

 

And, you know, with that comes passed promotions, missed opportunities to earn more or even job loss or having to leave the workforce. And then that contributes to implications for long-term retirement security and savings. So really there’s this cascading effect that just stems from the need to plug this gap.

 

MARTIN: What, why is it a daughterhood penalty and not just a caregiving penalty? You’re very specific about this. You say this is daughters. This is not, you know, everybody. Why is that?

 

KORDUCKI: Well, I should clarify that the gap, the gender gap in caregiving for family members, unpaid caregiving, is really, really narrowing. There’s an almost equal distribution of handling any caregiving responsibilities between the genders. But when you look at the hours spent, when you look at who ends up becoming the primary caregiver, when we’re looking at extended families or children of the elderly or friends, it’s women disproportionately shoulder the largest share. 

 

And so, you know, that really comes down to societal gender norms. It comes down to the way things have kind of always been done. And women also pay a steeper price professionally when they’re called away to attend to elderly parents or kids or, you know, we’ve heard about the motherhood penalty too, which is kind of a similar phenomenon, that employers are not always the most flexible. There’s not really the kind of infrastructure to accommodate people who need to take care of other people outside of their jobs and who need to divide their time in that fashion.

 

MARTIN: How did this story come to you? I mean, you profile a number of people who have had this experience and we’re gonna get to that in a minute. I do wanna hear some of their stories, but how did this story come to you?

 

KORDUCKI: Yeah, well, we’ve been hearing about this caregiving crisis for a long time. And 2026 is kind of a milestone year in that the very oldest baby boomer boomers are turning 80 this year. So with the boomer population rapidly aging, you know, this is gonna become a rapidly compounding crisis. It already is beginning to. It’s really mind blowing, like this is such a huge issue and people are so kind of at the ends of their ropes really feeling kind of alone and isolated in this seemingly intractable, problem.

 

MARTIN: And the thing about it is you follow women who are, I’ll just put this in air quotes, doing everything right or who had done everything right. I mean, these are people who had stable jobs. They had built their careers, they had savings, they were planners. They thought they had kind of set up systems to address these issues. This isn’t something that people just kind of, you know, gave no thought to. And they still find themselves depleted, overextended going broke, having to dip into, you know, not just exhausting their parents’ savings to take care of them, but dipping into their own savings, which then compromises their own retirement, which they then are sort of worried about passing on the same legacy to their kids, you know, if they have kids. Why is it like that? Like what’s the, what’s the big picture here? Is there something about the way we have thought about or not thought about aging in America that is leading to these outcomes? 

 

I mean, is it, I mean, Social Security in part is supposed to have addressed this, isn’t it?

 

KORDUCKI: Yeah. Well, one of the huge issues is that when these programs were put into place, the average life expectancy was much shorter.  I think the average life expectancy was something like 68 years for the average American when Medicare was put into place. So, you know, now people are living a lot longer and the retirement phase of life can span decades. So there’s that. And also just the costs of care and caregiving have dramatically risen. Healthcare costs in general have dramatically risen over the years. And we, we just don’t have the kind of financial investment and long-term planning that’s necessary to meet these needs. I mean, most of us are going to need some long-term care for probably years. And there is very, very little foresight into just structurally dealing with that. And also at the individual level. It’s just not something that anybody wants to think about. 

 

MARTIN: You point out in the piece, you point out in the piece that seven in 10 Americans over the age of 65 will need long-term care, yet more than 60% of adults over 50 don’t realize that Medicare does not cover it. And that gap is important because people sort of in their fifties should be thinking about — should be — but, you know, thinking about what’s coming down the pike. And at that point it’s, it’s harder to catch up from a savings perspective. 

 

What are some of the stories that you, that, that you report, some of the people’s stories that you reported on that stood out to you? 

 

KORDUCKI: Yeah. So I spoke with one woman who’s in her early forties, and her mother actually is not particularly aged. She’s a middle boomer in her, I believe, late sixties, early seventies. And this woman is in her early forties and basically, like, dropped everything at the age of 23 to become her mother’s full-time caregiver after her mother had a surgery to correct a degenerative congenital spinal condition that completely inhibited her mobility. She needed full-time care after that. And so this woman who had been working as a manager at a beauty supply store in New York City just quit her job, moved in with her mother, and 17 years later, she’s still living with her mom. Her entire life is about caring for her mom. Her mom needs help bathing, dressing, dealing with wound care. She’s at a very high risk for falls. She needs to be monitored

 

 MARTIN: Constantly monitored, yeah. How does she feel about it?

 

KORDUCKI: It’s been really hard. I mean, she doesn’t think of it as a waste. But she does think of it as a sacrifice. It’s been, it’s been a huge sacrifice and she’s given up a lot. She’s given up a career. She’s given up the ability to save for her own future. She’s terrified about what’s gonna happen when it comes time for her own retirement. She has no savings. It’s been really, really hard. And also very just socially isolating. She told me, I, you know, I really, really wish that I had just some kind of a partner in crime. Like, I wish that I had a sister who would help or any, any support.

 

MARTIN:  I take it she’s an only child, so.

 

KORDUCKI: Yeah. She has a, she has a brother who…

 

MARTIN: She has a brother. 

 

KORDUCKI: Who is somewhat estranged. <crosstalk>

 

MARTIN: Let’s ask the hard question about that. Like, what’s, why, why isn’t the brother helping more? Like why isn’t this burden, burden, responsibility, let’s put it that way, more equally shared?

 

KORDUCKI: I do know that there’s some estrangement there. But this is a common story. Like the people who are the closest geographically or who are the daughters are the ones who end up stepping up because it’s what needs to be done. 

 

MARTIN: Filial duty is a critical part of most cultures. I mean, most cultures acknowledge the fact that children have a responsibility to their parents. You know, they have a duty to — <crosstalk>

 

KORDUCKI: Yeah absolutely. And I would say that that comes through in this, in this phenomenon. It is just, it seems to be more acutely felt by daughters.

 

MARTIN: And I’m just trying to sort of think, some people are gonna hear our conversation differently. Some people are gonna be, I mean, some people will listen to that. And so, you know, well, so what? You know, that’s just how it is. That’s how it’s always been. Right? And, but some people might argue that these women are making choices and that they could make different choices. Like what would you say to that? They could make the same choice their brothers are making.

 

KORDUCKI:  I asked versions of that question, and the resounding answer was sort of like, that, that wasn’t an option. Like, just doing nothing is not an option.Whatever career situation or professional opportunities or whatever is at stake for me. Like, I’m not gonna risk putting my parents in a subpar —

 

MARTIN: Or in danger. Or in danger.

 

KORDUCKI: Yeah.

 

MARTIN: Because many of the people who you profiled in the piece, I mean, the fact of the matter is these seniors could not live alone.

 

KORUDCKI: Yeah.

 

MARTIN: Or the care that they require partly because of dementia, is that they can’t, it just isn’t safe for them to live alone. And it’s just a lot more expensive to care for folks who are living with some of these health conditions than perhaps was envisioned when these policies sort of took hold. 

 

I am curious if you think that given that so many people are dealing with these circumstances, whether there’s any policy energy around dealing with this as a society. I mean, for, I’m thinking about, for example New Jersey Senator Andy Kim — well, a United States senator from New Jersey — has talked publicly about his father’s Alzheimer’s and the difficulty of caring for him. And he of course, you know, has a demanding job and he’s a son, but feels a sense of responsibility. And I just wonder if you’re seeing any sense of sort of policy momentum around this?

 

KORDUCKI: So there’s the WISH Act, which was a 2025 bipartisan proposal for federal long-term care insurance benefits that would help older adults afford home-based care. Which is kind of the goal for most people is to keep their older loved ones at home. And that’s also aimed to reduce the reliance on Medicaid for long-term care  for those who are eligible. The idea is that that would be funded through a payroll tax on employees and employers which seems like a very sensible move. 

 

But yeah, it, it’s really been difficult to get serious momentum on this issue. I think for a number of reasons, one of them being simply that it’s not something that people like to think and plan about…

 

MARTIN: Interesting.

 

KORDUCKI: …but also it’s sort of seen as women’s work. And I think deprioritized for that specific reason.

 

MARTIN: It’s interesting because, you know, with childcare, there’s all these, this sort of, I don’t know, heat I guess around it. Like, you know, the whole question of should this country do more to support women in the workforce because now of course, we have a counter movement where people are saying, Well, women should stay home with their kids.But you know, again, you can choose to have kids or not, but you can’t choose to be somebody’s child. That’s a decision that’s made for you. And so, one of the things I guess that strikes me about it is there’s all this heat, there’s a lot of heat and some sort of, you know, I guess I would sort of say, you know, kind of cultural sort of anger and back and forth about childcare but there’s almost silence about this, about taking care of elders. And I just wonder why that is. I think, is it because people are just so exhausted just by living their lives, they don’t have time to be involved in the public space? Or, or, or what, what is it? Do you know what I mean?

 

KORDUCKI: Yeah. I think that might be part of it. But also, you know, for all the heat and discussion about childcare that hasn’t really generated much in terms of actual policy, has it? I, not, certainly not at the national level. It is interesting that there is this conversation happening on the one end and maybe not so much on the other end. And part of that also I think has to do with, again, what I said earlier is just people don’t like to think about aging. People don’t like to think about this stuff until it’s already in their faces. Because it’s kind of scary and unpleasant. 

 

And also just what aging means and looks like now is so new. 20, 30, 40 years ago, it wasn’t common to live, kind of, for 20 years, 30 years after retirement and with increasing health and mobility and perhaps cognitive limitations during that period of time. Like, there are people who need long-term care now for 20 years, 30 years. And that’s pretty increasingly common. 

 

MARTIN: Before we let you go, have you, forgive me for asking this, but, you know, I’m gonna ask, has this, doing this reporting made you think differently about what’s next for you? Like what, how you might have to live your life going forward?

 

KORDUCKI: It’s something that I think about all the time anyway. My parents are boomers and I don’t live near them. And I’m the only daughter of three. That being said, my brothers are wonderful and I know that my brothers will step up and that we’ll be a team when the time comes. 

 

But yeah, I think about it all the time, like, where will I live? Will I stay where I’m currently living? Will I move to be closer to my parents? Yes, I think about it all the time. it’s a reality.

 

MARTIN: Kelli María Korducki, thanks so much for talking with us.

 

KORDUCKI: Thank you so much for having me.