“By 2025, absenteeism due to stress complaints will be twice as high among women as among men,” I read in this newspaper. The figure comes from a study by the occupational health and safety services HumanCapitalCare and ArboNed.
They see absenteeism due to stress increasing every year in the Netherlands. Stress problems now cause 26 percent of all sick days. And women in particular pay the price. How come?
Seven stressors
Seven stress factors for women keep recurring in international and Dutch publications about sex and gender differences. The common thread: more tax, less reward and less room for maneuver.
1Women more often do ‘exhausting work’
Women are highly overrepresented jobs with high task demands and little room for control. Industrial psychologists call these exhausting jobs. Examples are primary education and nursing. These sectors are also emotionally demanding. For example, you must remain calm and empathetic at all times. Absenteeism in primary education and nursing is well above average. This applies to female and male employees.
However, this mainly affects women. They make up more than 80 percent of the workforce in both sectors.
2Women are structurally paid less
Financial worries lead to tension and stress. And women in particular have to deal with this. They are paid significantly less than men. This is partly because care, culture and facilities are women more often towards part-time work. Also women earn less per hour worked than men: a difference of 10.5 percent on average.
If you correct for work experience, position, age and other personal characteristicswomen in business still earn 6.9 percent less than men. For the government this is 1.8 percent.
3Women experience more health problems
In 2023, the average absenteeism due to illness was among women at 5.7 percent. For men the figure was 3.9 percent. When thinking about women and absenteeism, we (too) often immediately think of menstruation, pregnancy and menopause. There are more challenges. Dutch women experience on average more physical and psychological complaints than men. An important cause is that disease and health of women for a long time have been less well researched. This can lead to complaints being recognized later and taken less seriously.
4Care remains unevenly distributed
When it comes to the household, caring for the children and informal care women do substantially more than men. This also applies in families where the partners do the same number of hours of paid work outside the home. Most men say that they think an equal division of the household is important, but do not act on it.
Even when the executive work at home is fairly evenly distributed, planning and organization end up and thus the mental burdenstill mainly among women. According to researchers, this leads to significantly more stress and burnout.
5Women are given tasks that do not help their careers
Women often get this not only at home, but also at work assigned tasks that men neglect. Women are more often asked to do jobs that do not lead to good reviews or promotion opportunities, but are necessary. So called non-promotable tasks. Examples include writing reports, serving on committees and training new colleagues. Refusing is socially riskier for women. This has been investigated within companies and universities, among others.
6Women are more likely to experience inappropriate behavior
Particularly in healthcare and the catering industry, employees are confronted with inappropriate behavior from patients, customers and colleagues. Think of sexual harassment, humiliation and aggression. By 2023, 13 percent had of working men have to deal with this. And 21 percent of working women.
7Persistent prejudices work against women
Research shows: women are systematically assessed as less competent than men with a comparable background. Women also have to prove themselves more in the work environment to get the same opportunities. When women become mothers, prejudices increase further and opportunities further decrease. These and other forms of stereotyping and exclusion structurally lead to more stress.
Practical
I regularly experience employers shifting the responsibility for absenteeism due to stress to their employees. For example, they claim that all absenteeism above 2 percent is not due to ‘real’ illness, but is in our head or is the result of factors outside of work.
That’s too simple. Chronic stress is literally in your head, but it does make you sick. In addition, a lot of stress – especially for women – is caused by the work environment. And anyone who, as an employer, does not take factors outside work into account, such as children, household and informal care, ignores the daily reality of employees.
Three tips:
- Examine your blind spots. Men – including me – underestimate what women experience at work and how their own careers were and are sponsored by their partner’s unpaid labor.
- Look critically at your organization. Many practices and rules favor employees who do not take on care responsibilities at home.
- Obey the law. Employees do not want a resilience course. They want work to be organized in such a way that women and men experience less stress, in the workplace and at home. That’s not a favor or a luxury, that is simply stated in the Working Conditions Act.
