"Stress levels are related to work and not just the sex of the worker. They seem to be concentrated in frontline workers who deal with the public a lot like nurses and nurses' aides who deal with angry patients, or the person who answers the telephone who must deal with complaints, the sales clerks, the bank tellers," Feldberg says. Women who serve the public, including health care workers and sales and service workers, and non-traditional workers, reported more harassment and violence than many of the workers in other occupational groups, she adds.

Some of the women's comments included such things as:
-"... We've gone from having 3,000 employees to 1,500 and even though revenue is down, you're working harder to get in that work, I mean now you are your client's psychologist, you are your client's accountant... [and instead of management supporting you] they are questioning people and there's been incidents where a manager will actually be like screaming at an employee in front of their co-workers over a problem... Everyone is dancing as fast as they can and you know, no one minds that, but they want to be treated with dignity."
-"... There was an individual who was at one of our public terminals and he was pounding on it... She works on the information desk, she went over to say "Can I help you?" and he stood up and smashed her in the face and broke her jaw. Now this is not the kind of work environment that you expect in a public library but it is very much a part of our life."
-"... Initially of course [the employer] denied that it [a repetitive strain injury] was anything to do with the work that I've done for the past 30 years. Couldn't possibly be that. It was no doubt because on occasion I knit a sweater and it was no doubt due to the fact that 25 years ago I had two children, and you know, they sent an investigator to my home and said, 'Do you lift small children?'"

Based on these findings, the researchers argue that Workers' Compensation Board claims data do not reflect the experiences of women who participated in focus groups and the survey, and need to be re-examined. The researchers recognize the need for: further examination of the impacts of air quality, stress and violence on the health of working women; further examination of joint health and safety committees' responsiveness to women's health issues and the differences reported between joint health and safety committees which meet the needs of women and those which don't; further study of whether environmental factors such as equipment and work stations, rather than the sex of the worker, are the source of ill-health.

"Recent literature suggests that women's occupational health is poorly understood for several interrelated reasons," the researchers report. "First, women have been conspicuously absent from most occupational health studies, largely because most research focused on the impacts of equipment, exposures and habits of males working primarily in male dominated sectors... Second, when women were included in occupational health research, the design of the studies did not accurately or adequately reflect their experiences and concerns... Third, measuring instruments and methods of data collection often inaccurately reflect women's work experiences or their positions in the labour force and society... Finally, occupational health research has more frequently looked at the highly quantifiable conditions, such as accidents and cancers, than less dramatic, harder to categorize but equally disabling hazards, such as workplace organization."

The survey and focus groups were designed to redress these research problems.

For more information, contact:

Georgina Feldberg
Centre for Health Studies
(416) 736-5941

Cindy Kleiman
Department of Communications
(416) 736-2100, ext. 22086
YU/049/96