Who is responsible for care? Gendered accountability and family reputation in Pakpak families

Household care is often assessed through visible task performance, but task sharing can coexist with unequal responsibility for noticing needs, initiating action, coordinating care, ensuring completion, and absorbing consequences when care fails. This qualitative study examines how household and kinship environments organize care responsibility among Pakpak women in North Sumatra, Indonesia. Fieldwork conducted from March to May 2025 combined semi-structured interviews with 30 married or previously married women and contextual field observations across three communities. A thematic-abductive analysis identified five connected components of care accountability: anticipation, initiation, coordination, continuity, and answerability. Men’s domestic participation was described as intermittent and, in some accounts, request-dependent, while women remained the practical fallback for household continuity. Kinship-based evaluation and family reputation extended responsibility beyond the marital household. Fatigue and fairness concerns revealed strain but did not, by themselves, constitute responsibility transfer. The study contributes to human behavior in the social environment scholarship by distinguishing task participation from responsibility ownership and specifying observable targets for social work assessment and family intervention.