It starts with stress. In 2017 the UK’s Health and Safety Executive (HSE) released a report on stress in the workplace which revealed that, in every age range, women had higher rates of work-related stress, anxiety and depression than men.31 Overall, women were 53% more stressed than men, but the difference was particularly dramatic in the age range thirty-five to forty-four: for men the rate was 1,270 cases per 100,000 workers; for women it was nearly double that, at 2,250 cases per 100,000 workers.
The HSE concluded that this disparity was a result of the sectors women work in (stress is more prevalent in public service industries, such as education, health and social care), as well as ‘cultural differences in attitudes and beliefs between males and females around the subject of stress’. These may well be part of the reason, but the HSE’s analysis is sporting a pretty dramatic gender data gap.
Since 1930 the International Labour Organization (ILO) has stipulated that no one should exceed forty-eight hours a week at work, by which they meant paid work.32 Beyond this number of hours workers start incurring health costs. But there is a growing consensus that things may be a little bit more complicated than that.
A 2011 analysis of data collected on British civil servants between 1997 and 2004 found that working more than fifty-five hours per week significantly increased women’s risk of developing depression and anxiety – but did not have a statistically significant impact on men.33 Even working forty-one to fifty-five hours seemed to increase the probability of mental health problems in women. This was in line with a 1999 Canadian study34 and a 2017 analysis35 of six years of data from the Household Income Labour Dynamics of Australia Survey, both of which found that women had to work far fewer paid hours than men before their mental health started to deteriorate.
But it’s not only about mental health. Swedish studies have found that moderate overtime work increases women’s hospitalisation and mortality rate, but has a protective effect for men.36 A 2016 US paper on the impact of long work hours over a thirty-two-year period found a similar gender disparity.37 Working moderately long hours (forty-one to fifty hours per week) was ‘associated with less risk of contracting heart disease, chronic lung disease, or depression’ in men. By contrast, such hours for female workers led to consistent and ‘alarming increases’ in life-threatening diseases, including heart disease and cancer. Women’s risk of developing these diseases started to rise when they worked more than forty hours per week. If they worked for an average of sixty hours per week for over thirty years, their risk of developing one of these diseases tripled.
So, what’s going on? Is this all proof that women are in fact the weaker sex?
Not exactly. In fact, the Australian study found that although the average man could work substantially longer hours than the average woman before his mental health was negatively impacted, there was one group of workers for whom the gender gap was much narrower. These workers are called the ‘unencumbered’, that is, workers with little to no care responsibilities. For the unencumbered, both men’s and women’s work-hour thresholds were much closer to the forty-eight hours stipulated by the ILO. The problem is, women aren’t unencumbered. It’s just that the work they do is invisible.
When Ryan Gosling thanked his partner Eva Mendes at the 2017 Golden Globes for her unpaid work, acknowledging that without it he would not be on stage accepting an award, he marked himself out as a rare man.38 Far more usual is the impressively unperceptive man Guardian columnist Hadley Freeman wrote about in 2018: ‘“I have kids and I work full-time,” one boss crossly told a friend of mine who asked to have Fridays off. “Yes, and your wife quit her job to look after the kids,” my friend couldn’t quite bring herself to reply.’39
This man simply couldn’t see – or perhaps didn’t want to see – all the unpaid work that gets done around him. The unpaid work that enables him to have kids and easily work full-time in paid employment. It doesn’t occur to him that the reason he doesn’t need Fridays off is not that he’s better than his female co-worker, but rather that, unlike him, she doesn’t have a full-time wife at home.
Of course most male bosses in heterosexual relationships won’t have a full-time wife at home, because most women can’t afford to quit work entirely. Instead, women accommodate their care responsibilities by going part-time. In the UK, 42% of women compared to 11% of men work part-time, and women make up 75% of part-time workers.40 And part-time work is paid less per hour than full-time work – in part because it’s rare that a high-level post is offered as a job-share or with flexible working hours. Women end up working in jobs below their skill level that offer them the flexibility they need41 – but not the pay they deserve.42
In Scotland in 2016 the average hourly gender wage gap was 15% – but this average hid the substantial disparity between full-time and part-time work.43 For those in full-time work the hourly gap went down to 11%, but the hourly pay gap between men working full-time and women working part-time was 32%. In 2017, median hourly pay for full-time employees across the UK was £14 per hour,44 compared with £9.12 for part-time employees.45
Some call women’s segregation into low-paid work a choice. But it’s a funny kind of choice when there is no realistic option other than the children not being cared for and the housework not getting done. In any case, fifty year’s worth of US census data46 has proven that when women join an industry in high numbers, that industry attracts lower pay and loses ‘prestige’,47 suggesting that low-paid
