The Care Penalty: What Happens When Caregivers Try to Return to Work (in Flanders, Belgium)

Recruiters penalize them, even after the caregiving ends

Photo by Gaëtan Spinhayer on Unsplash

We are about to face a caregiving crisis, and the labor market is woefully unprepared. By 2050, the informal care burden per person in Europe will climb nearly 50% above early-century levels. Populations are aging. Fertility rates are falling. Professional care systems are buckling. More workers will step away from their jobs to care for sick children, aging parents, or ailing partners.

When those caregivers try to return to work, employers are skeptical. Still, recruiters prefer caregivers over the unemployed

That’s the central finding of “Couldn’t Care Less? Understanding and Reducing the Hiring Penalty of Care-Related Career Breaks,” a new study by Liam D’hert, Morien El Haj, and Stijn Baert at Ghent University. Using a factorial survey experiment with 260 professional recruiters in Flanders, Belgium, the team found that job applicants returning from caregiving breaks score roughly 7 to 8 percentage points lower on both interview invitation and hiring probability scales compared to continuously employed candidates.

Yet policy agendas across Europe treat inactive workers, caregivers among them, as a latent labor reserve waiting to be “activated.” The assumption is that supply is the problem. The data suggest demand matters just as much.

Why Employers Discriminate

D’hert and colleagues tested six theoretical channels. Three explained the penalty.

Employers expect workers to be fully devoted to their jobs and available at all hours. Caregiving violates these norms. It signals that a candidate prioritized family over work, and might do so again.

Hours spent caregiving are hours not spent working. Absent explicit information that duties have ceased, recruiters assume they continue.

Time away from work, regardless of cause, is assumed to erode job-relevant competencies. Caregivers suffer this penalty just as the unemployed do, though less severely.

Two other theoretical channels didn’t pan out. Enrichment theory suggests caregiving builds transferable skills (organizational capacity, emotional intelligence) that should enhance employability. The data show no evidence that employers recognize these competencies. Social role theory predicts caregivers might be penalized for lacking “agency,” meaning traits like leadership and self-confidence associated with masculine professional ideals. They weren’t. Caregivers scored no differently than continuously employed candidates on perceived agency or competence.

One exception: caregivers are rated higher on warmth. Recruiters see them as more likeable and attuned to others’ feelings. But warmth alone doesn’t open doors.

By The Numbers

• Caregivers score 7.9 percentage points lower on interview invitations than continuously employed candidates

• Caregivers score 6.9 percentage points lower on hiring probability

• The unemployed fare worse: 17.5 percentage points lower on interviews, 16.7 points lower on hiring

• Caregivers receive a warmth bonus of +0.7 points on a 10-point scale

• Gaps of 1 to 3 years add an extra penalty of 5.2 points (interview) and 3.4 points (hiring) compared to gaps under one year

• Gaps over 3 years add 9.0 points (interview) and 7.5 points (hiring)

• The informal care burden in Europe is projected to rise 50% per person by 2050

• The study drew on 260 recruiters evaluating 1,300 fictitious candidates across 9 occupations

The Unemployment Comparison

Caregivers fare considerably better than the unemployed. The unemployment penalty runs roughly twice as severe, with drops of about 17 percentage points on interview and hiring scales.

A caregiving break offers a clear, socially acceptable explanation for time away from work. Unemployment carries the stigma of market rejection. Employers wonder what’s wrong with someone nobody else wanted.

The perception data add texture. On commitment and skill deterioration, unemployed candidates fare far worse than caregivers. On availability, the two groups look identical. Recruiters assume both will struggle to show up reliably, stay late when needed, or remain free of competing obligations.

The Childcare Paradox

The study included five types of caregiving breaks: caring for a sick child, caring for an aging parent, caring for an ill partner, foster care, and stay-at-home parenting. On interview invitations and hiring decisions, recruiters didn’t distinguish between them.

Beneath those aggregate numbers, a pattern emerges in the perception data. Parents who stepped away for their own children face the harshest judgments on commitment and availability. Stay-at-home parents and those caring for sick children were rated as poorly as the unemployed on commitment, and worse than the unemployed on availability.

We might expect the opposite. Childcare needs stabilize over time; children grow up. Eldercare typically escalates until death. Recruiters should view childcare breaks as more bounded. They don’t.

The explanation likely lies in perceived voluntariness. Caring for a dying parent reads as unavoidable. Staying home with healthy children reads as a choice. Recruiters punish the choice more than the circumstance.

What Works (And What Doesn’t)

The experiment embedded randomized “availability statements” in candidate profiles to test whether targeted signals could counteract employer bias.

Two statements improved caregivers’ ratings: “The candidate is flexible” (emphasizing willingness to adjust hours) and “The candidate is able to adapt well to rapidly changing situations.” The adaptability signal lifted not just availability perceptions but also judgments of commitment, agency, and competence.

One statement just flat out flopped: “The candidate has few responsibilities outside of work” produced no improvement. Employers aren’t reassured by candidates who claim to have shed their outside obligations. The denial may seem implausible, or it may be the wrong frame. Active signals (”I am flexible”) outperform passive ones (”I don’t have constraints”).

Even the successful signals didn’t close the gap. The care penalty shrank but didn’t disappear. For unemployed applicants, nothing worked.

Context Matters

The care penalty shrinks when recruiters evaluate jobs they know well. In familiar occupational contexts, the penalty dropped by roughly one-third.

When recruiters understand a job’s actual demands, they rely less on crude heuristics about what caregivers can or cannot do. Caregivers may face better odds applying to employers and roles where they have existing relationships or industry knowledge. Cold applications to unfamiliar sectors are likely harder.

What Isn’t There

The study has limitations worth noting.

The experiment was conducted in Flanders, Belgium. Labor market norms and employer attitudes vary across countries. The care penalty may be larger or smaller elsewhere.

Factorial surveys present stylized candidate descriptions, not full resumes. Real hiring decisions involve cover letters, LinkedIn profiles, and interviews that could amplify or attenuate the effects observed here.

Recruiters learned the reason for the career break and its length, but not its intensity (24/7 care or part-time?) or current status (have duties ended?). Both factors could shape employer perceptions.

The study found no significant difference in how male and female caregivers were penalized. Some prior studies have found men punished for deviating from breadwinner norms; others have found women punished through motherhood penalties. Weisshaar (2018) found larger penalties for men. Raiber (2025) found a male premium. The null result here may reflect offsetting effects.

What Should Change

Activation policies that push caregivers into a labor market where employers systematically screen them out accomplish little. The paper suggested that anti-discrimination frameworks may need to explicitly address caregiving-related employment gaps.

Employers are excluding candidates based on assumptions about availability and commitment that may bear no relationship to actual circumstances. Structured interview processes and bias training should address caregiving history as a dimension where unconscious discrimination is likely. Employers facing labor shortages should recognize that former caregivers represent an underutilized talent pool.

Caregivers should emphasize flexibility and adaptability, particularly the adaptability framing, which signals competence alongside availability. Applications to familiar industries, where information asymmetry is lower, may yield better results than cold outreach.

The paper’s point being?

Caregivers returning to work face discrimination rooted in assumptions about their skills, commitment, and availability. These assumptions persist after caregiving ends. They apply equally regardless of whom the caregiver supported.

Our labor markets punish people for doing something society needs them to do. As care demands intensify, that contradiction will become harder to ignore. Employers who screen out former caregivers are shrinking their talent pools at precisely the moment labor supply is tightening.

On that note, It’s pretty clear that the labor supply isn’t tight enough else employers would be singing a different tune.