It is well established that the existence of stressful work environments has negative consequences for employees (deterioration in health, loss of income), organizations (decreased productivity, increased sick leave, increased absences from work and worsening of the company image) and society in general (increased resources allocated to health, decreased production of the country, etc.). In short, the economic cost of work stress is very high.

On the other hand, many studies support the existence of negative discrimination against women in the labour market. This discrimination results in them occupying different types of jobs than men (occupational segregation), having fewer opportunities for promotion and salaries, higher dismissal rates and suffering from harassment at work.

The question that arises is whether this worse situation in the labour market for women is also reflected in higher levels of work-related stress.

Data and method

The data used to analyse this situation come from the Quality of Life at Work Survey conducted by the Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs in 2010. The sample consisted of 5,820 employees. Among them, 36% of women reported experiencing very high levels of stress, compared to 31% of men.

To obtain evidence on which factors affect the level of stress and how these effects are different for men and women, the variable to be explained (the level of stress) has been related to different groups of variables that could be explanatory of that stress.

The characteristics of the person (for example, age, educational level, type of household, immigrant status and also the sex of the worker) and characteristics of the job they occupy (such as salary, job stability, organisation of working time, level of adjustment of the work skills with the position they perform) were taken into account. The processing of these data was carried out by applying statistical techniques specially designed for this purpose.

Highlighted findings

As a general result, it can be seen that both personal and job characteristics contribute to explaining the levels of work stress. In addition, the comparative study by gender tells us that women report higher levels of stress than men who have the same individual characteristics (except for sex) and who perform jobs with the same characteristics.

A more detailed study leads to the conclusion that personal and work variables do not explain this difference in the level of stress compared to women and that women’s greater dedication to family work, occupational segregation and certain personality traits presented by businessmen and businesswomen explain this difference in stress.

Economic and social policy measures

In general, the fact that some job characteristics turn out to be stressful for most workers allows us to think about designing labour policies that improve the quality of these jobs.

As far as women workers are concerned, government policies aimed at increasing their labour market integration rates should be accompanied by legislation that improves women’s working conditions, particularly in the area of ​​flexible working hours and work-life balance.

Specifically, the social measures to be adopted should be aimed at achieving higher levels of conciliation between family and work. To this end, the budget allocated to, for example, financing nursery schools should be even higher. In this way, we could be moving towards a more egalitarian society in which the double work day, that is, the paid and unpaid work that women normally do, is balanced among the members of the family unit. This would lead to the creation of a system in which men and women would be responsible for what happens outside the work sphere (co-responsibility).

Limitations of the study

This research has two clear limitations. First, the data was collected in 2010 and, therefore, there is a significant time lag with respect to the present. However, the sample used is representative of the entire Spanish salaried population, which allows conclusions to be drawn for the entire country. In addition, it is specifically designed to extract extensive information on the quality of life at work. It contains a large number of variables that allow the effect of sex on stress levels to be isolated. There are no other surveys in Spain that meet these two conditions.

The second limitation is that it uses information from a single year. A year-by-year follow-up of the same workers (so-called panel data) could help to identify which personal and job characteristics are actually causing the level of stress. This is called causality analysis. These relationships provide more information than analyses that are intended to explain the phenomenon using data from just one year.

Author Bio: Carlos Gamero Buron is Professor of Statistics and Econometrics at the University of Malaga