Long work hours have more negative impact on women
A new research says that working long hours, especially for women, may take a steep toll on one’s health.
Study researcher Allard Dembe, who is also a professor of health services management and policy at the College of Public Health at Ohio State University, said: “People who habitually put in a lot of long hours for many years, even decades, are really running an increased risk of potentially seeing chronic disease later in life.”
Dembe said that the link between long work hours and disease ”seems to be present a bit in men but is tremendously more evident in women”. The study, which was published in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, could not prove cause and effect but the associations they found were strong in women.
The study followed nearly 7,500 US men and women over more than three decades and looked information on their working habits. Most of the study volunteers were older than 50 toward the end of the study.
The researchers compared men who worked more than 60 hours a week to those who worked 30 to 40 and they found that those who worked the longer hours had more than twice the risk of getting osteoarthritis or rheumatoid arthritis.But men’s risk for other chronic or serious diseases didn’t go up substantially. In fact, those who worked 41 to 50 hours had a lower risk of heart disease, lung disease and depression, researchers noted.
When the study compared women who worked 30 to 40 hours a week to those who worked more than 60 hours a week, women who worked more had substantially higher rates of disease. Women who worked 60 or more hours had more than three times the risk of heart disease, non-skin cancer and diabetes, nearly three times the risk of asthma and nearly four times the risk of arthritis, the study showed.
The risks for women began to climb when they worked more than 40 hours and escalated above 50 hours. According to Dembe, the gender differences were surprising as was the strength of the increased risks he found for women.
The researchers then looked to see if there was any link between work hours and the diagnosis of eight diseases: heart disease, non-skin cancer, arthritis, diabetes, chronic lung disease, asthma, depression and high blood pressure, the study said.
Twenty-eight percent of those in the study worked 30 to 40 hours weekly. Most people — 56% — in the study worked 41 to 50 hours a week, the study said. Thirteen percent put in 51 to 60 hours weekly, while 3% toiled for 60 hours or more a week, the study found.
Dembe could not explain why more work hours seemed to have such an impact on women’s health but believes that women’s multiple roles are at the root. “My speculation is, they have to balance all these other roles, parenting, child care, domestic responsibilities, worrying about everyone’s health care,” he said.
Working the long hours can interfere with sleep and keep the body in a constant state of stress, Dembe said.
