Why should I care about equal care?
Well, it’s a tricky topic which at some point will crop up in every relationship. It’s hard for all of us to navigate; none of us have hit on the perfect solution or the perfect balance - but that’s exactly why we need to talk about it, and why we need to find better ways to share the care!
That’s also why Equal Care Day is so important to me. Our guest in this week’s podcast - writer, journalist and speaker Almut Schnerring - founded Equal Care Day e.V. with her partner Sascha Verlan in 2016, and the idea was always that it should fall on the 29th of February, “the day we don't see,” as she explains. “Most of the time we oversee it, and that’s what happens to care work.”
In the run up to this year’s Equal Care Day, she explained why the care gap is at the source of all the other injustices talked about more frequently - the pay gap, the pension gap, etc. “The lifetime earning gap is the biggest,” she says. In households with children, "women spend an average of 5 hours and 18 minutes a day on care work, while men only spend 2.5 hours.”
It made me wonder whether there’s a way to shift the rhetoric around care work from the current negative stereotypes (an unpaid career bummer) to something more positive - sharing care work more fairly doesn’t just improve your relationship with your partner and your kids, it also means that both parents benefit from the leadership skills that active parenting teaches us. How can we all do that? Well, I would suggest that -
👉 women give men a chance (so stop trying to do it all yourselves);
👉 male employees be braver about asking for parental leave;
👉 employers actively encourage their male team members to go on parental leave so that it becomes normalised.
We’ll be talking about all this and more this Thursday at Equal Care Day (I’ll be on a live panel with Sandra Westermann, Johanna Fink, Dr. Nina Gillmann and Christina Wildenrother which you can find out more about here:
https://lnkd.in/e7ecXfMA )and in the meantime please listen to our podcast with Almut:
on spotify - https://lnkd.in/eiv3HiMJ
and youtube - https://lnkd.in/eR9cYttt
Find the Equal Care movement @equalcareday on instagram or www.equalcareday.de online, if you want to know more.
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