Ungendering Women’s Health: Information Systems and Occupational Health Indicators

Abstract

Although women now comprise 47 per cent of the Canadian labour force, they remain concentrated in the service sector (Statistics Canada, 2005). Furthermore, women are more likely than men to experience precarious forms of employment, occupying the majority of part-time, casual, and self-employed forms of work that spread rapidly throughout the labour force in the 1990s (Cranford, Vosko, and Zukewich, 2003). At the same time, women report considerably fewer occupational injuries to Canadian compensation boards than men, accounting for only 30 per cent of compensated injuries between 1997 and 2004, according to the Association of Workers’ Compensation Boards of Canada (AWCBC). Women’s compensated injury rate may reflect fewer hours spent on wage work (Heisz and LaRochelle-Côté, 2003). Alternatively, it may reflect the different occupations held by women and men. Women are concentrated in a small number of female-dominated occupations that have been compared, perhaps ironically, to the US Food and Drug Administration’s ‘GRAS’ or ‘generally recognized as safe’ category (McDiarmid and Gucer, 2001: 667). Nonetheless, some authors have challenged this categorization, suggesting that female workers may face systematic discrimination when trying to gain recognition for their diseases, which are often non-traditional (Messing, 1998b; Lippel, 2003). In addition, women as precarious workers may not benefit from the compensation systems to the same extent as their male counterparts (Lippel, 2006b; Bernstein, Lippel, Tucker, and Vosko, 2006).