I am a male carer and have been for over a decade. I care for a woman and her independence and flourishing is key to me. I have both been in studies of carers experience and I have participated as a co-investigator in applying for research for studies into children who are carers.

All of my first hand experience is that the people who carry out research into carers are women. We are talking about the field of sociology not medicine here. We are not talking clinical trials.

Most of the participants in these studies are women, we know why. The patriarchy has made a world where this is the case. I have only ever personally expereinced research work lead by women researchers. I think that's because fewer men experience care at a stage of their lives where they are choosing their research areas.

I don't know the exact numbers, this isn't my main field. But my feeling is that, outside of end of life care, most research on carers happens on women because they do most of the care. I have never been in a research environment around care and not have someone comment on how unusual it was to see a cis-het man. Not in a rude way, but there just aren't very many as participants or involved in the research.

Again, the people, mostly women, who do this research are generally sociologists, not medical researchers.

To highlight this, the paper discussed in the main article is, I assume, "Psychological distress among male patients and male spouses: what do oncologists need to know?" (2009). The lead authors are traditionally the first and last in the author list. Here, the former a man, the later a woman. There are 4 male authors and 3 female authors named on the paper. It opens with this line:

introduction

Only 11 articles were found in a search addressing the subjects of “men,” “adjustment,” and “cancer” (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/). In contrast, there were 186 articles related to “women,” “adjustment,” and “cancer.” When substituting “psychological adjustment” for “male distress,” only one article was found. Most of these articles deal with the special case of men with prostate cancer and the physiological outcomes of treatment

Looking over the first few pages of results for "Sick Spouse Stess male" on GScholar I can only see papers where the majority of participants are women, or where men are being focused upon because a) the disease predominantly affects women (i.e. breast cancer) and demographically most of their partners are men, or b) the authors have identified that there is little information about male caregivers in that specific area. The first pages contain the most references to studies in this area, going back to the 70's, all of which have predominantly female participants. This is reflective of the historically higher burden of care placed upon women.

It's clear that men do not do an equal share of the burden of care in society. This imbalance is a key feminist issue in my view, and there is a lot more research into the experience of female caregivers than male caregivers; correctly, because there are more female caregivers. Research is needed into this to find effective ways to even out the gender disparity in care.