What do we know about men working in social care?

This Sunday’s International Men’s Day and we want to celebrate the contribution of the male workforce to the adult social care sector. Here we share with you what we know about men working in social care.

We estimate there are 1.45 million people working in adult social care, 18% of whom are male, which is equivalent to 240,000 jobs.

Our data estimates that males are more likely to work in senior management (33%) and support and outreach roles (25%). Only 10% of occupational therapists were reported to be male and only 14% of registered nurses were male, and registered nurses with 14%.

Males are more likely to work in adult day services (25%) and adult community care (24%). Domiciliary care services have the lowest proportion of male workers at 16%. This is consistent across both local authority and independent services.

The percentage of males working in adult social care is fairly evenly spread across England. London has the highest proportion of males in the sector at 20%. The Midlands and Yorkshire and Humber have the lowest proportions, each with 16%.

The personal assistant workforce

Our latest workforce intelligence report also gave us insight into the male personal assistant workforce. 17% of the PA workforce is male, 1% lower than the adult social care sector estimate.

Males are more likely to be PAs for a family member or friend (21%) than non-family or friend PAs (13%).

Find out more

Our workforce intelligence team produce and publish a range of reports and publications about the adult social care workforce, written by our team of expert analysts.

You can find out more about demographics here, and find national local and regional workforce information on our website.

Discover how you can collect information about your workforce and benchmark your business with a National Minimum Data Set for Social Care account.

When you log in to your account, you can access a suite of dashboards which focus on the demography of your staff – click on the gender dashboard and you can see the percentage of male and female workers in your organisation. There’s an easy ‘what does this tell me’ section which explains the date and signposts you to useful resources.

Print this page