But the data, although full of gaps, is mounting. Anne Rochon Ford, a women’s health researcher, tells me about how they started to realise there might be a problem in Canada. ‘One of the central Toronto community health centres that is very close to Chinatown was seeing a lot of women coming into their clinic who had a particular cluster of conditions that are traditionally associated with chemical exposure,’ she explains. It turned out they were all nail-salon workers. Several studies of air quality in nail salons have shown that they rarely exceed occupational exposure limits, but these limits are based on data that doesn’t account for the impact of chronic, long-term exposure. And this is particularly an issue when it comes to endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDCs) because, unlike most toxins, they can be harmful even at very low concentrations and they are found in a wide range of plastics, cosmetics and cleaners.27
EDCs mimic – and therefore can disrupt – reproductive hormones, ‘triggering changes in how cells and organs function, with an impact on a diverse array of metabolic, growth, and reproductive processes in the body’.28 The data on EDCs and their impact on women is limited.29 But what we do know is enough to give us pause, and should certainly be enough to trigger a full-scale data-collection programme.
EDCs are known to be linked to breast cancer, and several studies have found that cosmetologists are at a particularly elevated risk of Hodgkin’s disease, multiple myeloma and ovarian cancer.30 When occupational health researchers Jim and Margaret Brophy investigated the chemicals used in automotive plastics workplaces (where plastic parts for motorised vehicles are produced) ‘we could not find any substances that they were using that weren’t suspected’ to be either a mammary carcinogen, and/or an endocrine disruptor. ‘If you’re camping or around a campfire and somebody throws in a plastic bottle or a styrofoam cup people run away,’ Brophy points out. ‘The smell is enough to tell you it’s toxic. Well that’s what these women are doing on a daily basis. They’re working on moulding machines which heat up these plastic pellets which are full of all kinds of EDCs.’
After ten years working in a job where she is exposed either to mammary carcinogens or an EDC, a woman’s risk of developing breast cancer increases by 42%. But the Brophys found that after working for ten years in the auto-plastics industry a woman’s likelihood of developing breast cancer trebles. ‘And if you were under the age of fifty, so premenopausal breast cancer, it was a fivefold excess.’ Even a single year of working in this sector was estimated to increase the odds of developing breast cancer by 9%.31
The World Health Organization, the European Union and the Endocrine Society have all issued major reports on the dangers of EDCs, with the Endocrine Society in particular linking their use to the significant increase in breast-cancer rates in industrialised countries.32 And yet in many countries, regulation of EDCs is spotty at best. Phthalates, some of which have demonstrated endocrine-disrupting properties, are chemicals used to make plastics softer. They are found in ‘a wide range of products – from children’s toys to shower curtains. They are also used in nail polish, perfumes, and skin moisturizers, and can also be found in the outer coating on medicines and in the tubing used in medical devices’.
In Canada, they ‘are explicitly regulated only in soft vinyl articles for children; their use in the Canadian cosmetics industry is largely unregulated’. In the EU, as of 2015 EDCs can’t be produced unless authorised for a specific purpose – but they are allowed in products imported from abroad. In the US, there are no federal laws that require companies to list ingredients in their cleaning products (in the US women do 70% of household cleaning and make up 89% of home and hotel cleaners – most of whom are ethnic minorities), and a recent report found that even supposedly ‘green’ cleaning products contain EDCs.33 When Always menstrual pads were tested in 2014 they were found to include ‘a number of chemicals – including styrene, chloroform and acetone – that have been identified as either carcinogens or reproductive and developmental toxins’.34
It’s clear that we need more and better data about women’s exposure to chemicals. We need data that is separated and analysed by sex, and which includes reproductive status.35 And physical effects need to be measured for women themselves, rather than being restricted to foetuses and newborns, as is all too often currently the case.36 We need researchers to understand that because of their unpaid workload women often drop in and out of the workforce and work more than one job at a time (which can lead to, in Rory O’Neill’s words, ‘a cocktail of exposures’), and that this means that research which tracks only a single, current employment is likely to be sporting a significant gender data gap.37
There is no doubt that women are dying as a result of the gender data gap in occupational health research. And there is no doubt that we urgently need to start systematically collecting data on female bodies in the workplace. But there is a second strand to this story because, as the stickiness of the myth of meritocracy shows, closing the gender data gap is only step one. The next, and crucial step, is for governments and organisations to actually use that data to shape policy around it. This isn’t happening.
In Canada, even where sex-disaggregated data on chemical exposure exists, the
