Gender Equality and Care Work

As China’s and Germany’s societies are rapidly ageing, the demand for care work has increased. Most care is provided by women. At the same time, working women carry a higher load of (unpaid) care responsibilities in the family, whereas professional caretakers work under minimally remunerated and precarious circumstances. Aging populations are a test for our societies and the increase in care work demand is a new challenge for gender equality. This leads to a clash between normative claims about ‘good care’ and a reality, often characterized by exploitation and neglect.

During two conference afternoons in Nanjing, experts and students from Germany and China discussed the implications of these trends and possible ways of mitigating them, exploring similarities and differences in care work and gender equality in China and Germany. In multiple panels, experts spoke about how professional care work can be revaluated, how structural gender imbalance contributes to the disadvantages of female care workers and presented local model projects and evaluated their possibilities for upscaling.

Subsequently it became clear that to make professional care work more attractive, it needs a better reputation to attract more workers and workers of all genders. Better working conditions and better remuneration are necessary to decrease the high fluctuation of staff and increase patient safety. Additionally local realities need to be considered, as most care recipients still receive their primary care by family members in both China and Germany. A support system needs to be established shifting the burden from families (and mostly women) to professionals and neighbourhood-initiatives.

Traditional gender roles, as well as social security systems that divert the burden of care towards private enterprises and rely too much on families for provision of care work are obstacles towards high quality, fairly compensated and socially just care for the elderly. To ensure an effective transition into an ageing society these factors need equal attention.

The upcoming publication that is summarising the discussions of this event will provide important insights on those challenges as well as possible solutions.