Occupations constitute a pivotal element of one’s career that has significant implications for health and well-being. While having a job positively affects health via social belonging and financial earnings, occupational conditions, including hazardous or stressful work content, shift work, or constraints of autonomy, can impair health and mental well-being. Beyond occupational conditions, the broader social structure occupations are embedded in, such as pervasive occupational segregation between women and men, has health-implications. Occupational segregation ingrains societal expectations about the suitability of occupational roles for women and men, with some being deemed unsuitable for one’s gender. Working in occupations deemed gender-atypical is linked to exclusionary practices in the workplace, elevated stress levels, and depressive symptoms (Taylor, 2016; Tophoven et al., 2015), thereby posing a distinct well-being-risk.
In light of this, our goal is to improve our understanding of the selection processes into and the health-consequences of working in gender-atypical occupations. To achieve this, we adopt a socio-genomic lens to methodologically address the bidirectionality of the relationship between health and held occupations and to dissect health-related selection processes into gender-atypical occupations from ensuing health-consequences of working in them. This can inform policy initiatives that aim for occupational integration and an equitable workforce by unravelling how stress-resilience, openness to new experiences, and other traits affect variation in who shies away from working in gender-atypical occupations. Additionally, this assesses the population health- and well-being-consequences of occupational segregation and stereotypes, potentially underlining the need for occupational integration and measures that address the risk-factors of working in gender-atypical occupations. Moreover, by conducting all analyses separately for women and men, we acknowledge that social expectations around gender-typical occupations may prompt gendered processes that differ between them. This contributes to a central topic in population health research – the interplay between genes and the environment – in the form of gene-sex interactions of the relationship between genetic variation, working in gender-atypical occupations, and health or well-being.
Proposed duration of the project is 36 months.
References:
Taylor, C. J. (2016). “Relational by Nature”? Men and Women Do Not Differ in Physiological Response to Social Stressors Faced by Token Women. American Journal of Sociology, 122, 49-89.
Tophoven, S., Du Prel, J.-B., Peter, R. and Kretschmer, V. (2015). Working in gender-dominated occupations and depressive symptoms: findings from the two age cohorts of the lidA study. Journal for Labour Market Research, 48, 247-262.