My father’s family comes from one of the small, picturesque fishing villages scattered along the East Neuk of Fife. Like many people researching their family tree, I expected to find familiar patterns: men inheriting land, women marrying out, property following the male line.
What I found surprised me.
Until well into the 20th century, it was often the daughters—not the sons—who inherited property. At first glance, this felt remarkably progressive. Women owning homes? Securing assets? In a conservative, coastal society? Fabulous, I thought.
Then I looked more closely.
The inheritance came with an expectation. The youngest daughter was typically responsible for caring for her ageing parents, often at significant personal cost. Marriage could become difficult or impossible. Paid work was limited. The house, then, was not a reward but compensation—a form of social security for a woman whose life choices had already been constrained by duty.
Viewed through that lens, the arrangement felt far less enlightened.
Which raises an uncomfortable question: how much has really changed?
A Gendered Burden of Health
Let’s start with health.
Female health priorities have historically struggled for attention, funding, and urgency. That imbalance becomes even more stark when we consider dementia—a condition overwhelmingly associated with older age, and one that disproportionately affects women.
Women are more likely to develop dementia than men, and not simply because they live longer. Biological, hormonal, and genetic factors all play a role. Yet despite this, dementia research, diagnosis, and support systems remain under-resourced, and often poorly designed around women’s lived realities.
Care: Still Women’s Work
Then there is care.
Across the UK, unpaid caring remains heavily feminised. Wives care for husbands. Daughters care for parents. Sisters, nieces, and granddaughters step in where the state does not.
In heterosexual relationships, men are often older than their female partners and tend to experience serious illness earlier. When that happens, it is usually the woman who becomes the carer—often for years, sometimes until death. By the time her caring role ends, her own health may be compromised.
If there is no spouse, responsibility frequently falls to a daughter.
As care demands increase, something has to give. And more often than not, it’s paid work. Women reduce their hours or leave employment altogether, commonly in their fifties—precisely the period when earnings and pension contributions should peak. Children have grown and demands on resources have reduced.
The Financial Fallout
The financial consequences are often profound.
Women already earn less than men on average. They already accumulate smaller workplace pensions. When caring forces them out of employment, that gap widens dramatically.
Those final 10 to 15 years of working life are often the most valuable for pension saving. Lose them, and private pension growth stalls. State pension entitlement can also be affected: currently, 35 qualifying years of National Insurance contributions are needed for a full state pension.
While carer’s credits exist, many carers either don’t qualify, aren’t aware of them, or fall through the cracks of an overstretched system. In the midst of caring for someone with a neurodegenerative condition like dementia—physically exhausting, emotionally draining, and relentless—long-term financial planning is rarely front of mind. People get by in the here and now, often at the expense of their future security.
The result? Women who were already disadvantaged in salary and pensions are penalised again for fulfilling a role society quietly expects them to take on.
A Perfect Storm
This creates an almost perfect storm.
An ageing population means dementia rates continue to rise—around 90,000 people in Scotland alone are currently living with the condition, though as highlighted by the previous article “Growing old is not for wimps by Prof Frank Gunn-Moore, this is probably an under-estimate (Enlighten). Most will rely, at least in part, on unpaid support from family or friends. And we know that support is most likely to come from women.
Yet unpaid carers remain politically invisible. Welfare budgets are consistently scrutinised, and carers are rarely prioritised. Addressing this properly would require investment, not cuts—and it is far easier to look away.
The costs don’t disappear, of course. They are simply shifted: onto women, onto families, onto communities, and ultimately back onto society when preventable poverty and ill health take hold.
Time to Re-Examine Our Assumptions
So why don’t we do more?
Is it because dementia and caring affect women more than men? Or because women’s unpaid labour has long been treated as an inexhaustible resource—natural, expected, and therefore invisible?
Just as the daughters of the East Neuk once “inherited” a house in exchange for lifelong care, modern women are still absorbing the costs of care in ways that rarely make it into policy decisions or public debate.
Because until we do, the real inheritance being passed down to women is not property or security—but responsibility, sacrifice, and long-term disadvantage.
After spending most of his career in senior roles within healthcare companies, Greg Stevenson is now a management consultant specialising in health policy and healthcare. On a personal level, he is supporting a close family member recently diagnosed with dementia on their post-diagnosis journey.
https://www.kingsfund.org.uk/insight-and-analysis/data-and-charts/unpaid-carers-nutshell
https://www.legalandgeneral.com/retirement/pensions/guides/gender-pension-gap
https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cdp-2025-0038