Speaking at the leadership briefing, Shelina Janmohamed, director of consumer equality at Ogilvy, said there were around 5.8 million unpaid carers in the UK, meaning one in seven employees had care responsibilities.
Janmohamed said there were 8.2 million families with dependent children, with 75% of mothers and 90% of fathers with dependent children in employment.
Within that, there are around 1.4 million “sandwich generation” carers, caring for both children and parents.
She said: “Care is the thing that holds our whole societies together. It is the invisible architecture that allows us to be in this room today, that allows us to go home and have families that we love. All of us will either be cared for or care during our lives, and sometimes we will be both.”
She said there was a lack of understanding around the “scale of care” happening in society.
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“We think of care in siloes, we don’t have a grand societal vision of all the many and varied kinds of care that we have. There’s no cohesive view of the many types of care we have,” Janmohamed added.
Undervaluing carers
For instance, Janhmohamed said parenting was usually not considered as a type of care, adding: “There are a lot of carers in this world, but we don’t connect them up and see how they join up.”
She noted that there was a “challenge” in getting people to identify as a carer, as there is a perception that it is “very pious, very worthy” and also “low-skill[ed]” or “women’s work”.
“It’s not something that we really value”, Janmohamed said, despite the £184bn value of unpaid care in the UK, which is equal to a second NHS budget. She added that this was also likely to be an underestimate, along with the number of carers.
On average, an unpaid carer delivers around £17,000 in unpaid care each year, she said.
Janmohamed said the ageing population would likely amplify care needs, and as people have children later in life, they would fall in the “peak care bracket” of 45-54 and be more likely to support both children and parents.
The impact on women in life and the workplace
Janmohamed said care was “deeply gendered”, with women making up 85% of sole carers for children, 65% of sole carers for older adults, and 61% of “sandwich carers” looking after both children and older adults.
She added: “We have all these ideas that women have the emotional labour, and we put in a second shift when we get home. There’s even something called the ‘daughterhood penalty’, so if there is a parent who needs care, it’s often the daughters who have to step up and look after them.
“All of that women’s work affects how women work. It already changes the way that women are able to show up in the workplace, so they’re more likely to work part-time, they’re more likely to have jobs that are term-time-only, and they’re more likely to be represented in job share arrangements. Women’s work in care is already affecting the way women show up in the workplace. It’s holding women back, and balancing these responsibilities isn’t easy.”
Janmohamed highlighted research suggesting 58% of women said caring responsibilities stopped them applying for a promotion or new job, 19% have left a job because balancing work and care was too hard and 20% said it is one of the top three issues facing women today.
She added: “There is a real myth that you may not be committed to your work, you’re going to be a bit flaky. People are really committed to their work, but care does take an emotional and physical toll, so there’s a struggle to balance work and family, mental wellbeing.”
She noted that the impact of care responsibilities was gendered, because although men were also carers, men and women tend to show up differently at work.
She added: “Women’s caring shows up in absenteeism. If there’s an emergency, you have to go, you can’t do anything about it. That also is going to have an interplay with some of the working from home versus the return to office mandates that we have. But men, on the other hand, have presenteeism, they feel this pressure that they have to come into the office and be seen.
“The difference is underpinned by the different way that men and women are caregivers, [such as] women being the default carer… so for every man who’s caring, there may well be a woman in the picture who can pick up the slack.”
How workplaces can support employers with caring duties
Janmohamed said companies that offer carer support can see a 10-50% reduction in absenteeism, a 1-7% fall in employee turnover and an up-to-72% return on investment from improvements in absenteeism and reduced employee turnover.
She said welcoming caregivers gave employers a “soft power”, as more people were expected to have care duties.
She added that carers had many transferable skills, including communication, teamwork and collaboration, building rapport, soft skills and emotional intelligence, resilience and stress tolerance, patience, reliability and responsibility, time management, multi-tasking, problem solving, critical thinking and risk assessment.
Janmohamed said workplaces could introduce policies such as carers’ leave and respite care, while supporting people in work after care duties end – particularly as that may be post-bereavement.
