Gender, SSE and French public policies for ageing at home

Abstract In France as in other countries, there is a consensual preference by public authorities, old people and their families to stay at home as long as possible. This means the necessity of care work carried out informally by relatives, or formally by professionals. Women are the main providers of care, formal or informal, and social and solidarity economy (SSE) organizations are widely involved in public policies for ageing at home. This raises questions about the role played by the associations, in the promotion of gender equality. The paper presents French context and our analytical framework about formalization of care: first, the ongoing professionalization of employees in oldest home care associations yet facing recurring funding difficulties; second, the emergence of new ‘peripheral’ associative services to ‘help family caregivers’, that tinker specific regulations to consider the specificities of care work. Then, using some results of two field surveys, we show how home‐based care associations had to define the boundaries between more and less ‘essential’ work, paid and unpaid care, and how this division between material and relational tasks, associated with ‘new innovative’ working frameworks, hybrid between voluntary work and salaried employment, risk to deny the reality of work in caring, and through that, gender equality.