Sex/gender analysis: Are risks of violence at work higher for men or women? It depends on type of violence

When it comes to workplace violence, are women at greater risk than men? The raw numbers would suggest a straight-up “yes”. But the answer is less clear cut when other factors are considered—most importantly, the type of violence in question.

According to an IWH analysis of about 30,000 responses to Statistics Canada’s 2009 and 2014 General Social Surveys focusing on victimization, the risk of physical and sexual violence was 75 per cent higher for women than for men. And after taking into account number of hours worked (an important factor given that women are more likely than men to work part-time) other work factors (occupation, industry and work schedule) and personal factors (age, marital status, education, home province, and rural or urban setting), the risk of workplace violence remained 57 per cent higher for women than for men. The results of the study, led by Smith, are included in a paper published online in July by Annals of Work Exposure and Health (doi:10.1093/annweh/wxy066).

IWH studies on gender differences in work and health turn up some surprises

Many people will remember Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's response—Because it's 2015—when he was asked about naming an equal number of women and men to his first cabinet. But across the Canadian labour force, gender parity in occupations and industries is far from a reality. The jobs and industries that were dominated by men or women in 1988 have remained just as segregated along sex and gender lines today as they were three decades ago.

That’s why work and health researchers need to apply a sex and gender lens to their work, says Dr. Peter Smith, a senior scientist at the Institute for Work & Health (IWH) and a Canadian Institutes for Health Research (CIHR) research chair in gender, work and health. The experiences of men and women are still so different, both inside and outside the labour market, says Smith. To ignore this is to miss an important part of the picture about how work and health are related.

In his work as a CIHR research chair, Smith recently co-edited a special issue of the Annals of Work Exposures and Health (AWEH), Vol. 62, No. 4, May 2018. The issue focused exclusively on sex/gender-based analyses of occupational health issues. The interest we received through the abstract submission and peer-review process exceeded our expectations, says Smith. It speaks to the increased momentum of research in this area.

But more needs to be done, he adds, particularly in developing research methods that can help us better describe how sex or gender interact with labour market and workplace exposures to produce differences in health outcomes. We can’t just assume that findings among men can be generalized to women, or vice versa, he notes. By taking a sex/gender lens to our research, we can produce findings that are relevant to all workers, not just to men or women only.

Described in this editorial package are the findings of recent studies by IWH scientists that examined sex and gender differences in work and health outcomes. Two were published in the special edition of AWEH, co-edited by Smith.

The picture completely changed, however, when the research team analyzed physical and sexual violence separately. Looking only at physical violence at work, and after taking all personal and workplace factors into account, differences in risk by sex/gender essentially disappeared. That is, the risks of physical violence for women and men were about the same.

This tells us that much of what produces differences between men and women in terms of risk of physical violence is due to the differences in the types of jobs, shift schedules and industries in which men and women work, said Smith at an IWH Speaker Series presentation in March, where he discussed these findings.

As for sexual violence at work, women were four times more likely than men to experience this form of violence. That elevated risk held true whether the research team took into account only hours worked, all workplace factors, or all workplace and individual factors. When it comes to sexual violence at work, women are many more times at risk than men, and that’s true regardless of what other factors are taken into account, noted Smith.

Source: At Work, Issue 93, Summer 2018: Institute for Work & Health, Toronto

Sex/gender analysis: Are risks of violence at work higher for men or women? It depends on type of violence

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