Gender Work Stress And Health

In Gender, Work Stress, and Health, editors Debra L. Nelson and Ronald J. Burke explore how socially defined gender roles affect individuals' experience of stress and health at work. Working with a group of interdisciplinary contributors, they examine the interplay of gender, individual differences, social support, coping skills, family dynamics, and aspects of the work environment and ask how these affect health. This collection draws from the emerging knowledge in the fields of management, psychology, sociology, and epidemiology. Among the questions examined are whether men and women experience different sources of stress at work, whether they experience different symptoms of distress, whether they benefit equally from social support, how they cope, and what organizations are doing to help. Professionals in human resources management, consulting, training and development, and occupational health will be particularly interested in the effectiveness of prevention and intervention efforts related to corporate culture and flexible workload arrangements and whether family-friendly policies are fulfilling their promise of helping to balance work and family demands. Researchers in management, business, occupational psychology, sociology, and gender studies will find fertile areas for continued exploration within this field.

In this volume the authors examine the variety of ways in which gender affects the stress process.

Until recently, theories and research about job stress and ways of coping have been based primarily on men's experience. Women's experience of stress and coping has remained unexplored, despite studies which show that women are confronted with more and different work-related stressors than men.

In this volume the authors examine the variety of ways in which gender affects the stress process.

Until recently, studies of women's health received scant research attention in the context of the overall magnitude of research conducted on health. Even for health issues that affect both men and women, most research has been limited to male subjects, leaving a large gap in our knowledge base concerning women's health. Finally, the decade of the 1990s is ushering in a shift in this inequity. In 1990 the U.S. National Institutes of Health issued a compelling report citing the lack of sufficient research on women's health as a major gap in our knowledge, and a mandate has been issued to add women as study subjects in research or to document why they have not been included. Such directives will undoubtedly lead to a much-needed burgeoning of research activities in the area of women's health as we approach the twenty-first century. Despite limited research resources, however, there have been steady, scientifically rigorous voices in the wilderness for the last several years, and many of the best investigators are represented in this volume. These workers have led the vanguard in exploring psychosocial factors that are likely to differentially affect women's and men's health. For example, women and men engage in social roles that often differ, if not in quantity, then certainly in quality. Sex differences in role expectations, environmen tal qualities, role burdens related to the domains of work and family, and abilities to adapt to and cope with stressful situations may have a distinctive impact on health.

Research now shows us that long-term activation of the stress cycle can have a hazardous, even lethal, effect on the body, increasing the risk of obesity, heart disease, depression, cancer, and other illnesses. This new edition of an award-winning book presents cutting-edge research on the effects of stress. Edited by one of the worlds authorit

The second edition of A Handbook for the Study of Mental Health provides a comprehensive review of the sociology of mental health. Chapters by leading scholars and researchers present an overview of historical, social and institutional frameworks. Part I examines social factors that shape psychiatric diagnosis and the measurement of mental health and illness, theories that explain the definition and treatment of mental disorders and cultural variability. Part II investigates effects of social context, considering class, gender, race and age, and the critical role played by stress, marriage, work and social support. Part III focuses on the organization, delivery and evaluation of mental health services, including the criminalization of mental illness, the challenges posed by HIV, and the importance of stigma. This is a key research reference source that will be useful to both undergraduates and graduate students studying mental health and illness from any number of disciplines.