Stress can be detrimental when it comes to everyday life, and as a result, there can be consequences to our long-term health. A new study suggests women experience stress more when they are working in a sex-segregated work environment.
Indiana University Bloomington researchers Bianca Manago, a doctoral student in sociology, and Dr. Cate Taylor, an assistant professor of sociology and gender studies found that women are more likely to experience exposure to high levels of interpersonal, workplace stressors.
Things like social isolation, performance pressures, sexual harassment, moments of both high visibility and invisibility, co-workers’ doubts about their competence, and low levels of workplace social support can play a role in how a women might experience stress in a situation where she is the minority at work.
Manago and Taylor monitored women’s cortisol levels who work in that type of environment.
According to PsychCentral, here’s some of what they found.
“We find that women in male-dominated occupations have less healthy, or ‘dysregulated,’ patterns of cortisol throughout the day,” Manago said. “We use nationally representative data, the MIDUS National Study of Daily Experiences, which allow us to assess women’s cortisol profiles in workers across the United States.
“We also use statistical techniques to account for individuals’ occupational and individual-level characteristics, allowing us to be more confident that the dysregulation of cortisol profiles we observe is due to the negative working conditions of token women, and not their own personal characteristics nor the characteristics of their occupations.”
Dysregulation of cortisol levels can play a factor in health complications and disease down the road.
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
Clearly with some professions, there just are more men, just as there are some professions that are female-dominated as well. The solution to this kind of issue would ideally come from more efforts put into diversifying the more segregated fields of work as opposed to anyone changing professional directions for this reason.
Photo: Flickr user Neil Moralee
