What is Care Work? – Feministisches Streikkomitee Augsburg

An important aspect of our activist work focuses on the issue of care work. The exhibition “What would help you? Solidarity” – until 10.06.2023 at Grandhotel Cosmopolis – combines quotes from mothers and primary caregivers with demo banners and signs from past actions of the Feminist Strike Committee Augsburg.

We have already dealt with what care work is and how it is related to gender roles and stereotypes.

Care work means

All activities of caring: cooking, cleaning, washing, raising children, caring for relatives, but also paid care work or pastoral care count as care work. Female-read people do most of this care work; and usually on a marginal or unpaid basis.

Who does care work?

Private and professional care work is done by female-read people: Out of 100 people working in health care (elderly care, nursing, outpatient care, administration, etc.), 75 are women. In education occupations, the share of female-read persons was 72 per cent in 2019.

Who provides care work during the Corona crisis?

If the external service providers for care work fail – as is currently the case due to school and day-care centre closures – female read persons take over the activities in the private sphere. This is the conclusion of the study “Roles and distribution of tasks among women and men during the Corona crisis” (Dec 2020): Female-read Persons state that, in addition to their gainful employment, they perform a large part of the domestic care work (housework such as cleaning, cooking, washing, shopping as well as raising children and organising everyday family life) – a fact that was no different before the pandemic. The nursery and school closures are now at the expense of female care work – 49 percent of the female read persons said the current situation was pushing them to their physical, psychological and emotional limits. This is only true for 30 percent of men.

What does care work have to do with role models?

The discrepancy between care work performed and the perception of fairly distributed tasks shows that the stereotype of the “caring woman*” still prevails. People who are read as female take on care work in private as a matter of course. The problem with this still prevailing role model – it emerges even more in the crisis – is not only the self-evidence with which female-read persons take on care work. Rather, it is the lack of appreciation of care work in the private sphere and the low pay in the professional context. Organisations like Care Revolution and feminist protests draw attention to this problem.

References:

* Where women are referred to here, we cite the studies that adhere to the binary gender categories.