Motherhood, Job Injury Risk Linked in Study
The conflicting demands of job and family life take a heavy toll on women with young children, resulting in more injuries on the job, according to a UCLA study of women in the Southern California aerospace industry.
Working women with children under the age of 6 are three times as likely to suffer an on-the-job injury as women with older children or no children at all, epidemiologist Jess F. Kraus and his colleagues report today in the journal Epidemiology.
And even though job skills increase with experience and maturity, the demands of motherhood increase more dramatically. Older women with young children--those over 50 caring primarily for grandchildren--are seven times more likely to suffer such injuries than other women, the UCLA School of Public Health team reports.
The research “is especially important” because it provides the first direct evidence of the effects that the dual role of mother and wage-earner has on working women, said Dr. Susan P. Baker of Johns Hopkins University.
Baker cautioned, however, that the results should not be used to discriminate against women with young children. “The most promising preventive actions are those that make it easier to do a job safely. . . . (Those) would protect not only the 19% of women with children less than 6 years old, but also the other 81% of the female work force.”
The new research also is timely because mothers of preschool children represent the fastest-growing segment of the work force, noted Amy Rock Wohl, director of the Los Angeles County Fire Department’s occupational health program. In 1950, only 12% of mothers with preschool-age children were employed outside the house, contrasted with 52% in 1990, she said.
The data should provide ammunition in a long debate in professional literature that has grappled to understand how this increased challenge has affected women. To date, Wohl said, writings in the field of psychology generally have been polarized around two contrasting theories--the “scarcity hypothesis” and the “expansion hypothesis.”
The scarcity hypothesis--almost certain to get a boost from the new study--argues that women are hard-pressed to accomplish both roles satisfactorily, and that they display conflict, anxiety and other psychological effects. The expansion hypothesis, on the other hand, argues that women actually have reduced anxiety when they begin working outside the home and that a woman’s energy merely expands to meet the additional demands--making her almost a “superwoman.”
Several previous, smaller studies have examined the potential for anxiety and distress among mothers who work outside the home, Wohl said, but none have used control subjects (working women without children, or non-working women) and none have studied occupational injuries.
Kraus, Wohl and epidemiologist Hal Morgenstern, of the UCLA School of Public Health, studied the employees of a large aircraft manufacturing company for the year 1989. The company employed 4,200 blue-collar workers in manufacturing occupations, 1,400 of them women.
They identified 156 cases in which women suffered a traumatic injury on the job, excluding repetitive motion injuries. Most of the injuries--which were reported to the on-site health office--were strains, sprains, cuts, bruises and the like. For each woman who was injured, the team identified two uninjured controls of the same age who worked in the same department.
Overall, women with children under the age of 6 were found to be 2.9 times as likely to be injured on the job, and the risk increased with age. Women in their 20s with such children were only 1.2 times as likely to be injured as other women, but those in their 30s were 4.7 times as likely and those over 50 were 7.5 times as likely to be hurt on the job.
The researchers didn’t study men who raise young children.
Surprisingly, belying the image of the harassed single mother, marital status did not make much difference. Married women with young children had about the same accident rate as their single counterparts.
Some critics have suggested that perhaps the women with young children were more likely to report their accidents in order to take time off for child care or other parental functions, but the data did not support that conclusion, researchers said.
The team observed essentially no differences among the groups of women when it came to the most severe injuries requiring time off. Instead, the differences showed up primarily in relatively inconsequential--but nagging--injuries that required treatment but did not force the workers to take time off.
