Working carers study: half skip family-friendly measures over stigma fears

A survey of working caregivers in Hong Kong, led by Professor Bobo Lau of Tung Wah College and reported in the week ending Saturday, 7 November 2026, found that more than half of carers have never used the family-friendly measures their employers offer, even though those who do use them report less depression and a lighter caregiving burden. The Hong Kong Working Caregivers' Mental Well-being Survey, carried out by academics from five Hong Kong universities and colleges, covered 566 people who combine a job with caring for a family member. Lau said some carers fear being labelled by colleagues if they keep taking leave to care for relatives.

Many families depend on someone who holds down a job and also looks after an ageing parent, a sick spouse or a child with special needs. This study puts numbers on a problem that is easy to overlook: the support may exist on paper, but people do not use it. A policy that sits unused helps no one, and the survey suggests the reason is often not cost or rules but workplace culture, the worry that asking for flexibility will mark someone as less committed.

The gap between users and non-users is notable. Among carers who had used caregiver-friendly measures, fewer had high depression scores than among those who had not. The survey is a snapshot, so it cannot prove that the measures caused the difference: carers in more supportive workplaces may differ in other ways. Still, the pattern is in the direction that employers and families would hope, and the researchers singled out two practical, low-cost measures, flexible hours and working from home, as the most helpful.

For Indian families and employers, the study's message, that offering flexibility is not enough unless managers and colleagues make it normal to use it, applies to Indian offices as much as to Hong Kong ones. Experts quoted on the study called for workplace cultures to change so that carers are not stigmatised.

Peepals calculation: The share of carers with above-average depression scores was 10 percentage points lower among those who used family-friendly measures (55% − 45% = 10), which means the users' rate was about 18% lower in relative terms (45 ÷ 55 ≈ 0.82). If nearly 70% of the 566 carers had access to at least one measure, that is roughly 390 people (566 × 0.7 ≈ 396) who could have used support, yet more than half of all respondents never did. Our calculation from the reported figures.

Short-term: Employers that already offer flexible hours or home working may need to look at whether staff feel free to use them, for example by having managers state openly that caregiving leave and flexibility will not count against anyone.

Long-term: As populations age and more workers care for older relatives, workplaces that make support easy to use are likely to keep experienced staff who might otherwise cut their hours or leave.

Who is affected: Employees caring for elderly parents, spouses or children; their families; employers and human resources teams; and policymakers designing support for working carers.

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