Today’s 1. March is equal-care day. While equal pay day, which commemorates wage inequality between women and men, has been in existence since 2007, equal care day is still relatively new. Only since 2016 has it been commemorated in leap years on march 29. February and in all other years on 1. Marz to the unequal distribution of care work, it says in a press release of the agency for work schweinfurt.

Doris kufner-schonfelder, equal employment opportunity officer at the schweinfurt employment agency, uses this day as an opportunity to point out that well over 80 percent of professional care work in germany is done by women. Women are disproportionately represented in childcare, elementary schools, nursing and domestic professions. Often, these services were not sufficiently rewarded or socially recognized.

In the private sphere, too, it is still mainly women who take care of the household, children and relatives. You also take on the "burden of responsibility" here (cf. Mental load) for the often invisible everyday organizational tasks that go hand in hand with care work. But even men have often had to experience in corona times how demanding and challenging, but also how important, care work can be. Homeschooling and the closure of care facilities for children and people in need of care have required additional effort, the release continues. According to the german institute for economic research (DIW), only around 15 percent of parents with young children manage to share employment and work in the household and family equally. When it comes to caring for relatives, women take on this task in seven out of ten cases.

The fact that women carry the main burden of unpaid work has many negative consequences. For the labor market, where women are missing as workers because they have to take care of the household, family and nursing or at least reduce their working hours for this purpose.

For security in old age, because the interruption of employment or the reduction in working hours also means lower pension entitlements _ and there is often a threat of old-age poverty.