The gender pay gap in care tells us a lot about how we value work
The gender pay gap is often treated as a problem of discrimination or individual choices. But one of its biggest drivers is hiding in plain sight: a care sector dominated by women, essential to society, and systematically undervalued by an economic model built around profit rather than human need.
When people talk about the gender pay gap, the conversation tends to settle into familiar territory very quickly. It becomes either a question of equal pay legislation being imperfectly enforced or a more cultural argument about women’s choices in work and career progression. Both matter, but neither gets close to explaining what is actually happening in a sector like care, where the pay gap is not simply produced at the point of hiring or promotion, but baked into the structure of the economy itself.
This week, I was pointed towards a briefing on care pay and the gender pay gap, and I’ll be honest that I initially struggled to see how to turn it into anything coherent. But the more I looked at the data from the Scottish Social Services Council workforce report for 2024 and the wider arguments from Common Weal’s Care Reform Group, the clearer it became that care is not just another low-pay sector. It is one of the key mechanisms through which gendered inequality is reproduced and stabilised in Scotland’s labour market.
The scale of the workforce matters here. According to the Scottish Social Services Council, the social care sector in Scotland employed around 214,750 people at the end of 2024. It is one of the largest employment sectors in the country, with housing support and care at home alone accounting for roughly 36 per cent of the workforce. It is also a sector that is overwhelmingly female-dominated. Depending on the sub-sector, women make up the large majority of frontline care work, meaning that care is not a marginal contributor to the gender pay gap. It is structurally central to it.
Our recent briefing on this is useful here, even if it sounds almost too blunt at first. If around 8 per cent of the entire Scottish workforce is in social care, and the overwhelming majority of that is female employment, then something like 15 per cent of women in work are concentrated in a single sector. That alone would not be unusual in itself, except for one defining feature: it is a sector in which large proportions of workers are paid at or only marginally above the minimum wage. Even if the precise figure varies depending on how you measure it, the structural point holds. A very large share of women’s employment is clustered in very low-paid work in a way that simply does not have a male equivalent at the same scale.
This is where the usual framing of the gender pay gap starts to break down. It is not just that women are underpaid relative to men doing the same job, although that still exists in places. It is that women are disproportionately located in sectors that are themselves underpaid, and those sectors are underpaid not because they are economically marginal, but because they are socially and politically undervalued. Care is essential infrastructure, but it is treated as if it is low-skilled, low-productivity work that should therefore be low-cost.
That assumption is not accidental. It is historically rooted in the gendered division of labour, where care work inside the home was unpaid and therefore culturally coded as non-economic. When that work moved into the formal labour market, it retained much of that status. The result is that the transition from unpaid domestic labour to paid social care did not transform its valuation. It simply monetised it at a low rate.
Once you combine this with the current structure of the sector, the picture becomes more stark. The SSSC data shows that while the workforce is growing, with increases in adult care homes and childcare services, the underlying employment conditions remain fragile. Around 83 per cent of workers are on permanent contracts, which sounds stable until you realise how close pay levels sit to statutory minimums, and how fragmented the sector remains across private, voluntary and public providers. Around 41 per cent of provision sits in the private sector, where profit extraction is a structural feature rather than an exception.
This is where Common Weal’s critique becomes important, particularly the argument made in pieces on private care homes and profit extraction. The central claim is not just that private providers make a profit, but that the system is designed in such a way that public funding is routinely siphoned off through ownership structures, tax arrangements, and cost manipulation. Even conservative estimates suggest around 10 per cent of care home fees are extracted as profit. In a sector funded heavily by public money, this represents a significant diversion of resources away from frontline care.
“the gender pay gap in care is not a residual inequality waiting to be corrected. It is a structural feature of how value is distributed in a capitalist labour market that continues to devalue feminised labour while relying on it to function.”
But the key link to the gender pay gap is what happens next. If a system is structured to extract profit while keeping care costs politically and socially acceptable, then wages become the adjustment variable. Care work has to remain cheap for the model to function. And because care work is overwhelmingly done by women, the burden of that suppression falls disproportionately on female employees.
This is why it is more accurate to talk about an equity pay gap rather than simply an equal pay gap. The problem is not only that men and women are paid differently for equivalent roles. It is that entire categories of work dominated by women are systematically devalued through market structures that require low wages to sustain profitability. In other words, inequality is not just distributed within the labour market. It is embedded in the way value itself is assigned to different kinds of work.
There is a further distortion here that is often missed in more surface-level discussions of gender inequality. Care work is not just low-paid, it is also socially essential. It underpins the entire economy. Without it, neither paid employment nor social reproduction would function. Yet because it is historically associated with femininity and domesticity, it is treated as if it requires less skill, less training, and therefore deserves less remuneration. This is not a neutral economic assessment. It is a gendered hierarchy disguised as market logic.
This became difficult to ignore while I was thinking about this article earlier this week. Sitting outside during my lunch break in the unusually hot weather, I watched a care worker walk past with a disabled child she was supporting. It was nearly 30 degrees. While many of us were seeking shade or heading indoors, she was patiently helping that child enjoy some fresh air and experience the world beyond four walls. It struck me that this is what care actually looks like. Not an abstract sector on a spreadsheet, but a person giving their time, attention and emotional labour to somebody who needs it. It is work that allows people to live with dignity. It is work that allows families to function. It is work without which society simply could not operate.
Yet we have constructed an economy that routinely treats that labour as less valuable than many forms of work that are far less socially essential. We rarely stop to ask why. Why should the person caring for a disabled child be paid little more than the legal minimum wage? Why has an entire sector been designed around the assumption that those performing some of society's most important work should accept chronically low pay? These are not natural outcomes. They are political and economic choices.
What makes this harder to shift is that the sector is politically fragmented. As the SSSC report highlights, care services are split across local authorities, private providers, and voluntary organisations. This fragmentation weakens collective bargaining power and limits the ability of workers to negotiate improvements across the sector as a whole. Low pay is therefore not just a consequence of undervaluation, but of structural disorganisation in the labour market itself.
Attempts to address this through voluntary collective bargaining agreements, such as those recently proposed in Scotland, are important but limited. Voluntary schemes allow governments to signal progress while leaving underlying power structures intact. If participation is optional for private providers whose business models depend on low labour costs, then the incentive to fully adopt higher pay standards is weak at best. The result is a system where political rhetoric about valuing care runs directly alongside an economic model that depends on its underpayment. That contradiction is not incidental. It is the core tension in the sector.
What emerges from this is a more uncomfortable conclusion about the gender pay gap itself. It is often treated as a problem that can be solved within the existing structure of the labour market, through better transparency, stronger enforcement, or more equitable hiring practices. But care suggests something more fundamental. If a large proportion of women’s employment is concentrated in a sector that is structurally designed to be low-paid, then the pay gap cannot be resolved without changing the valuation of the sector itself.
That means confronting questions that are not usually framed as feminist issues, but absolutely should be. What is care worth in a society that depends on it? Why is work associated with femininity systematically underpaid compared to work associated with masculinity or capital-intensive productivity? And why do we continue to accept a model in which essential social infrastructure is delivered through profit-extracting systems that rely on keeping wages low?
None of this is about suggesting that care workers should simply be paid more within the existing system, although that would clearly be an improvement. It is about recognising that the gender pay gap in care is not a residual inequality waiting to be corrected. It is a structural feature of how value is distributed in a capitalist labour market that continues to devalue feminised labour while relying on it to function.
If that is the case, then the question is no longer just how to close the gender pay gap. It is whether we are willing to rethink why the gap is produced so consistently in the first place, and what that tells us about which kinds of work we are willing to properly value as a society.
