Do Explanations of Absenteeism Differ for Men and Women?

Despite the consistent finding in the absence literature that women tend to be absent more often than men, little attention has been paid to whether the process of absence differs by sex. This issue is examined using data collected from 1401 Australian employees from 61 different workplaces. Hypotheses suggest that the predictive ability of job satisfaction, age, commuting time, family responsibilities, stressful life events and shift work on absence behavior differs for men and women. To test these hypotheses, a multivariate model is developed and estimated. The results indicate that there are structural differences in the absence behavior of men and women, requiring the estimation of models separately for each sex. Moreover, strong support for all but one of the hypotheses is found. These results show the critical importance of considering the sex of employees when developing explanatory models of absence.