The caregiving squeeze: work and the sandwich generation

A senior data engineer I will call Priya did the maths one evening and decided to step down to a lower-banded role. Nothing had gone wrong with her work. Her reviews were strong, her on-call record clean. What had changed was arithmetic. Her father had been discharged after a fall and needed someone to drive him to appointments twice a week. Her youngest had started school with a pickup time no afternoon meeting respected. Her employer had just moved from two office days to four. Somewhere in that overlap, the role she was good at stopped being a role she could physically hold, so she traded title and pay for a calendar she could actually control.

Her manager logged it as a personal choice. In a sense it was. But it was the kind of choice you make when every structural option has been quietly removed, and it is happening across the experienced middle of the workforce far more often than performance dashboards reveal.

The squeeze has a name

The people in Priya’s position are sometimes called the sandwich generation: caring for children and ageing parents at the same time, pressed from both sides. The label is decades old, but the demographics underneath it have intensified. People are having children later and parents are living longer, so the two care windows that used to arrive in sequence now overlap. For a lot of workers, the heaviest years of parenting and the first years of eldercare land squarely in their late thirties and forties — which is also, not coincidentally, the stretch when careers are supposed to compound into seniority.

This matters for tech and data teams specifically because that is your senior individual contributor and your first-line manager. It is the person who holds the institutional memory of why a pipeline is shaped the way it is, who mentors the juniors, who gets paged when the model drifts at 2am. When that person downshifts or leaves, you do not lose a headcount you can backfill from a job board. You lose judgment that took years to build.

The work itself is mostly invisible. Caregiving does not show up in a sprint board or a commit history. It shows up as a camera that stays off during the standup, a hard stop at 5pm that reads as low commitment, a parental-leave-shaped gap that quietly reroutes someone off the promotion track. The labour is real and exhausting, but because it is unpaid and happens off-screen, organisations tend to treat its collision with work as a private logistics problem rather than a business one.

The numbers point one way

The clearest economic figure comes from Deloitte, whose research on the cost of inaccessible care estimates that a lack of access to care drives more than two million lost workdays a year — a missed economic opportunity of roughly 16.5 billion dollars. That is not the cost of caring; it is the cost of caring with no support, when the only way to manage a sick child or a parent’s hospital appointment is to drop out of work entirely for the day. Treat the precise dollar figure as directional, since it rests on modelled assumptions, but the direction is not in doubt: unsupported care leaks straight out of the productivity ledger.

The support side of that equation is thin. In Deloitte’s reading, only about four in ten workers report having paid carer’s leave or genuine flexibility to manage caring responsibilities. Fewer than two in ten women with childcare responsibilities say they have access to affordable care. Put those two together and you get the trap Priya fell into: the people most likely to be doing the caring are the least likely to have either the time or the money that would let them keep working at full tilt.

That rise is the second number worth sitting with. AARP’s research tracks the share of women providing family caregiving climbing from about 21 percent in 2015 to roughly 25 percent in 2020 and around 29 percent in 2025 — close to three in ten, and trending upward. The reasons are structural rather than a change of heart: an ageing population, thinner formal care infrastructure, and the same later-parenthood pattern that creates the sandwich in the first place. The load is not just heavy; it is growing, and it is landing disproportionately on women already.

Why this is a gendered problem, and why that should worry you

When a household faces a care gap, the person who steps back is still, far more often than not, the woman — even in dual-earning, dual-career couples. Some of that is preference, but a great deal of it is cold economics and lingering norms: if her pay or her schedule is treated as the more adjustable one, hers is the career that absorbs the shock. Each individual decision looks rational inside one kitchen. Aggregated across an industry, it becomes a slow, steady drain of experienced women out of senior technical and leadership roles — the exact pipeline that every diversity report claims to be trying to fill at the top.

That is the part that should worry a team lead even if they have no personal stake in the issue. You can run an immaculate hiring funnel and still watch your senior ranks skew male over time, simply because the women you hired and developed keep hitting a wall in their late thirties that the men around them do not hit as hard. The leak is not at the entrance. It is in the middle, where the care load peaks and the support runs out, and it is invisible unless you go looking for it in your own attrition data, sliced by tenure and life stage rather than by performance score.

It also compounds quietly with the women’s-health stresses that hit around the same age. A worker managing eldercare, school pickups, and, say, perimenopausal symptoms is not dealing with three separate problems she can tackle one at a time. She is dealing with one continuous overload, and the workplace tends to have a separate, half-built policy for each strand and no coherent answer for the whole.

The return-to-office collision

None of this would bite as hard if the trend in scheduling were running the other way. It is not. The drift back toward four and five mandated office days has, for caregivers, the effect of confiscating the one resource the pandemic accidentally handed them: control over the edges of the day.

Flexibility is what makes caregiving and a serious job co-exist. The ability to take a 90-minute block at 3pm for a parent’s specialist appointment and make it up at 9pm is not a productivity loss; it is the difference between staying in the role and leaving it. A rigid in-office mandate removes that lever, and it does so most sharply for the people already carrying the most. The mandate is written as if it were neutral — same rule for everyone — but a uniform rule applied to unequal circumstances produces unequal exits. The single parent with an eldercare obligation does not experience “four days in the office” the way a 25-year-old with no dependants does.

There is a tidy irony here. Organisations spend heavily to recruit senior talent and to advertise their commitment to advancing women, then adopt a blanket scheduling policy that predictably pushes a slice of that exact talent out the door. The cost never appears on the office-attendance dashboard that justified the mandate. It appears, months later and uncorrelated in anyone’s mind, as a resignation and a backfill.

Treating flexibility as infrastructure

The reframe that makes all of this tractable is to stop filing flexibility under perks and start filing it under infrastructure. A perk is a nice-to-have you grant from a position of generosity and withdraw when the mood for discipline returns. Infrastructure is load-bearing: you build it because the system does not function without it, and you do not rip it out to make a point about presence.

For a caregiver, predictable flexibility is load-bearing in exactly that sense. It is the thing that keeps an experienced engineer attached to a demanding role through the years when her dependants need her most. Frame it that way and the policy questions change. The question stops being “how generous should we be?” and becomes “what does our team need in place so we do not haemorrhage our most experienced people in their forties?”

Concretely, for a data or engineering org, a few things carry most of the weight. Paid carer’s leave that is genuinely usable, not a line in a handbook that everyone is quietly afraid to invoke. Output measured by what ships and how reliably it runs, not by hours visibly logged at a desk — a standard knowledge work should welcome anyway. Core collaboration hours that are tight and protected, with the rest of the day left flexible, so the team can sync without colonising the whole calendar. And mandates, where they exist, written with explicit, no-shame carve-outs for caregiving rather than as uniform rules that pretend everyone’s circumstances are identical.

There is a cheaper, faster lever too, and it costs nothing: managers who treat a care obligation as ordinary rather than as a problem to be hidden. A great deal of the damage is done not by policy but by the felt need to conceal — to pretend the camera is off for connectivity reasons, to never name the school run, to absorb the eldercare crisis in silence and let it read as disengagement. A manager who says, plainly, “block the appointment, we will work around it,” removes a tax that the org’s formal benefits never even register.

The bottom line

The caregiving squeeze is not a soft, peripheral wellbeing story. It is a retention-of-experience story wearing a wellbeing costume. The people getting pressed are the ones who hold a team’s judgment, and the trend lines say the pressure is rising, not easing, and falling hardest on the women that every senior-pipeline initiative says it wants to keep.

If you manage people, the practical move is to look at your own attrition through a different lens — not who underperformed, but who quietly stepped back or stepped out in their care-heavy years, and what structural option had been removed from them before they did. If you are the one being squeezed, the useful thing to know is that the trade Priya made is not the only one available, and that asking for flexibility is not asking for a favour. It is asking for a piece of infrastructure that lets a serious career and a caring life share the same day — which is the configuration a growing share of the most experienced workforce now lives in, whether their employer has noticed or not.