According to an analysis by the health insurance company AOK Nordost, caring for relatives in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania is mostly carried out by women. “The proportion of men among the caring relatives in MV is only 23.8 percent,” said the health insurance company in Schwerin on Wednesday. This affects the care of chronically or acutely ill relatives in their own four walls.
This percentage has hardly changed in recent years. According to the information, the number of caregiving relatives in the country rose by 10 percent to 14,700 from 2017 to 2021, the proportion of men rose by just 0.1 percentage points during this time.
From the point of view of the health insurance company, this “gender care gap” is also derived from the salary differences between women and men. “Because the loss of income is greater on average for men than for women, many men cannot afford to cut back on their jobs in favor of caring for relatives at the moment,” it said.
The deputy chairman of the AOK Nordost, Hans-Joachim Fritzen, sees this situation as outdated: “It doesn’t fit into the year 2022 that this task is still so unequally distributed between the sexes.”
