 The influence of work, household structure, and social, personal and material resources on gender differences in health: an analysis of the 1994 Canadian National Population Health SurveyVivienne Walters, Peggy McDonough and Lisa Strohschein Social Science & Medicine, 2002, vol. 54, issue 5, 677-692 Abstract: Data from the 1994 Canadian National Population Health Survey (NPHS) do not confirm the widespread assumption that women experience considerably more ill health than men. The patterns vary by condition and age and at many ages, the health of women and men is more similar than is often assumed. However, we should not minimize the gender differences that do exist and in this paper we focus on three health problems which are more common among women: distress, migraine and arthritis/rheumatism. We consider to what extent work, household structure and social, personal and material resources explain these gender differences in health. Analysis of the distributions of paid work conditions, household circumstances and resources reveal mostly minor differences by gender and differences in exposure to these circumstances contribute little to understanding gender differences in health. There is also little evidence that greater vulnerability is a generalized health response of women to paid and household circumstances. We find limited evidence that social, personal and material resources are involved in pathways linking work and home circumstances to health in ways that differ between the sexes. In conclusion, we consider some reasons for the lack of support for our explanatory model: the measures available in the NPHS data set which contains little information on the household itself; the difficulty of separating 'gender' from the social and material conditions of men's and women's lives; and changes in women's and men's roles which may have led to a narrowing of differences in health. Keywords: Gender; Social; determinants; of; health; Women; Work; Canada (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:socmed:v:54:y:2002:i:5:p:677-692 Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from Access Statistics for this article Social Science & Medicine is currently edited by Ichiro (I.) Kawachi and S.V. (S.V.) Subramanian More articles in Social Science & Medicine from Elsevier |
Is your work missing from RePEc? Here is how to contribute.
Questions or problems? Check the EconPapers FAQ or send mail to .
EconPapers is hosted by the
School of Business at Örebro University.