Gender, working conditions and health. What has changed?
Résumé
In Europe, despite the existence of laws on equal treatment that mainly concern wages and non-discrimination between individuals, the gender division of labour is ubiquitous: men and women do not pursue the same occupations and, when they are in similar jobs, their work activities, work experiences, chances of professional advancement and remuneration are not the same. One justification put forward for collective inequalities observed between men and women in the workplace is the stereotype according to which women are generally assigned to less dangerous and less arduous tasks. Policies on health at work and prevention practices, too, continue to be based on a gender-neutral model of ‘workers’, with the implication that these are male workers. That is why it makes sense to analyse the obstacles and resistance to taking the gender dimension into account in the context of health in the workplace, to produce data and studies to enrich our knowledge of the differences between men’s and women’s working conditions and their impact on their health and to come up with interesting examples and alternatives. These are the goals of the present study.