The influence of work, household structure, and social, personal and material resources on gender differences in health: an analysis of the 1994 Canadian National Population Health Survey

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Abstract

Data from the 1994 Canadian National Population Health Survey (NPHS) do not confirm the widespread assumption that women experience considerably more ill health than men. The patterns vary by condition and age and at many ages, the health of women and men is more similar than is often assumed. However, we should not minimize the gender differences that do exist and in this paper we focus on three health problems which are more common among women: distress, migraine and arthritis/rheumatism. We consider to what extent work, household structure and social, personal and material resources explain these gender differences in health. Analysis of the distributions of paid work conditions, household circumstances and resources reveal mostly minor differences by gender and differences in exposure to these circumstances contribute little to understanding gender differences in health. There is also little evidence that greater vulnerability is a generalized health response of women to paid and household circumstances. We find limited evidence that social, personal and material resources are involved in pathways linking work and home circumstances to health in ways that differ between the sexes. In conclusion, we consider some reasons for the lack of support for our explanatory model: the measures available in the NPHS data set which contains little information on the household itself; the difficulty of separating ‘gender’ from the social and material conditions of men's and women's lives; and changes in women's and men's roles which may have led to a narrowing of differences in health.

Section snippets

Work, resources and health

Paid work is associated, on average, with better physical and mental health for both men and women (Arber, 1997; Ross & Bird, 1994; Waldron, 1991; Walters, Lenton, & McKeary, 1995). Yet such general findings may obscure health differences that emerge from the nature of the job and the social organization of work. Within the demand-control model, for instance, it is argued that production processes that simplify and routinize closely supervised tasks create working conditions that impair health (

Data

The NPHS is a longitudinal study of a nationally representative sample of household residents in Canada initiated in 1994. In each of just over 20,000 households, limited information was collected from all household members and one individual, aged 12 years and older, was selected for a more in-depth interview. The initial household response rate was 88.7 percent, while the selected person response rate was 96.1 percent. More information on the sample design is available in Tamblay and Catlin

Results

In the following sections we report on the two types of analysis we conducted in an effort to understand gender differences in the experience of distress, migraines and arthritis/rheumatism.

Discussion

When we embarked on this research we expected to find some gender differences in health, though less marked and more variable than is often assumed. This was borne out. We also expected to find that gender differences in features of paid work and household structure, as well as social, material and personal resources would help to explain the gender differences in health that we did observe. Yet, they were not central in accounting for disparities in health.5

Acknowledgements

The National Network on Environments and Women's Health (NNEWH) provided funding for the research reported here. NNEWH is a Centre of Excellence for Women's Health based at York University and funded by the Women's Health Bureau of Health Canada.

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