Equal Care Day is backed by the Equal Care initiative, which has been addressing the unequal conditions in care work for ten years. The initiative emerged from the non-profit association klische*esc e. V. in 2015. The following year, February 29 - or March 1, depending on whether it is a leap year - was set as Equal Care Day. The date for the day of action was intentionally set on the "leap year day", as this is often forgotten, just as care work is often not sufficiently recognized or valued (Bundesverband; undated). By establishing Equal Care Day, the initiative aims to raise awareness of the fact that gender inequality in care work is a serious issue that needs to be given space in political discourse. In addition, by organizing a hybrid festival on Equal Care Day, the initiative aims to find solutions that can reduce the gender care gap at its root causes deep within the social system and not just deal with the symptoms (Bundesverband; no year).

The gender care gap describes the fact that care work is predominantly performed by women and girls: On average, they spend around 30 hours each week on unpaid care work, compared to around 21 hours for men and boys (BMFSFJ 2024). Care work is a cornerstone of every form of human coexistence. The term describes all activities in which a person looks after the physical, mental or emotional well-being of others or themselves. There are various forms of care work. It can be very directly recognizable as work "for" someone else, such as in the care, education or supervision of a person. However, activities that indirectly deal with the well-being of others, such as maintaining a household by cleaning, tidying up and doing laundry, also count as care work (Addati 2018). This work is often underpaid - such as in the area of care for the elderly or sick - or completely unpaid and is usually not recognized as the time-consuming, physically and mentally demanding work that it is, as in child rearing and housekeeping.

Unpaid care work is largely performed by women, as many state institutions and regulations are (or were) designed to ensure that citizens live in a so-called "male breadwinner model" (Gärtner et. al. 2020). This model is based on the assumption that the man in a heterosexual partnership earns the entire income for a family through full-time employment and the woman takes on all the unpaid care work. This and similar models have long been - and in some cases still are - seen as the social norm and are characterized by the idea of binary and complementary gender characters. Women are ascribed characteristics such as caring, empathy and patience, while men tend to be ascribed characteristics such as willpower, assertiveness or rationality. However, these are not natural characteristics, but rather gender stereotypes that we humans learn from birth through upbringing and socialization. Nevertheless, the belief that girls and women have a 'natural predisposition' for care work still persists today. Because of this belief, unpaid care work is often categorically seen as their task and they are encouraged to orient their career choices towards care work professions. In her work "Die Polarisierung der Geschlechterverhältnisse" (1976), Karin Hausen describes how these gender roles and the (spherical) separation between paid work (for men) and care work (for women) developed and intensified in the course of industrialization in Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries.

In January 2025, the Federal Employment Agency published a study comparing the proportions of women and men employed in various occupational fields. Five of the 30 occupational fields examined are counted as paid care work. In each of these five, the proportion of women is more than 50 %, in four of them even over 70 % (Federal Statistical Office 2024). These include activities such as teaching and training occupations, cleaning occupations, non-medical health, personal care and wellness occupations, medical technology, medical health occupations, education and social housekeeping occupations (Federal Statistical Office 2024). These occupational fields, which are often suggested to female socialized persons during their school education and in career guidance offers and are therefore also called "women's occupations" (Federal Anti-Discrimination Agency; no year), are often poorly paid. One of the main reasons for this is the fact that these female-dominated professions are often seen as less demanding than "male professions" (ibid.), as they have a lower degree of academization, for example. In addition, the interests of male employees are better represented in collective bargaining, which means that the problem of gender-specific wage discrimination is often not given high priority (ibid.).

This unequal distribution of men and women in better and lower paid jobs is one of the factors that make up the gender pay gap. This gap describes the fact that women earn less on average than men. In addition to the "female professions", this is also due to the fact that women are significantly more often in part-time or precarious employment (BMFSFJ 2023). The gap was 16% in 2024 (Destatis 2025).

In addition to the discrimination experienced by professional care workers, women and girls who perform unpaid care work are also structurally disadvantaged. They have less or no time for their education or their own employment and are often forced to live in financial dependence on their families, partners or state funds. They are also particularly at risk of poverty in old age, as they pay less or nothing into a pension fund over the course of their lives (BMFSFJ 2020).

The grievances in gender-specific inequality in care work are even more apparent in regions of the world characterized by poverty. In areas where there is no access to electricity and running water, for example, the care activities of unpaid female care workers also include tasks such as procuring firewood and clean drinking water (Oxfam Germany 2020). Both of these tasks often involve walking long, arduous distances. This means that, on average, women and girls have to spend even more time on unpaid care work. A study by the Women's Economic Empowerment and Care Initiative asked residents of five rural communities in Colombia, Ethiopia, the Philippines, Uganda and Zimbabwe how much time they spent each day on primary and secondary care work. The distinction between primary and secondary refers to whether the respective care work was the only task that the person performed during this time or whether the activity took place at the same time as another one. On average, the women surveyed stated that they spent a total of 13.8 hours a day on both of these types of care work, compared to 4.3 hours for the men surveyed (Karimli 2015).

As part of the central Equal Care Day conference, the "Equal Care Manifesto" was created in 2020, in which concrete demands for a fairer future for care work were set out. The signatories of the manifesto call for more appreciation and recognition for care work. This should be achieved through measures such as the inclusion of care work in the gross domestic product. They also call for more "structural support" for care workers. They want to achieve this primarily by improving working conditions in all care professions; however, they also propose further measures, such as the expansion of "professional support services" for care work in lower-income households (Bundesverband Equal Care 2020).