#37 CARING IS SHARING - Why Equal Care matters with Almut Schnerring

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 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 Johanna Mühlbeyer which you
can find out more about here:
https://www.linkedin.com/events/equalcare-whyshouldicare7163890428738547713/comments/)


More information on Instagram @equalcareday
or equalcareday.de online.

Speaker: Almut Schnerring - Author, Journalist, Speaker,
Equalcareday founder
Interviewer: Dr. Ricarda Engelmeier - Founder
MyCollective


Photo: Larissa Neubauer

#getinspired #podcast #inspiration #MyCollective #equalcare
#carework #caregap #paygap #equalpay #womenleaders #leadership
#parenthood #diversity #changemakers #ImpulseSessions
#parentalleave #elternzeit