Do Women or Men Have the Less Healthy Jobs? An Analysis of Gender Differences in Sickness Absence

In terms of wages and authority women are in less favourable jobs than men. This study examines whether women's jobs are also associated with more negative health consequences. Women's higher levels of sickness absence suggest that this might indeed be the case. Utilizing two large data-sets representative of the population of all employees in Norway, this study shows, however, that the gender difference in sickness absence is not due to women being in less healthy jobs. This conclusion is reached by comparing men and women who are both in the same detailed occupational category and at the same workplace, utilizing fixed-effects logistic regression models. This detailed control tends to increase rather than reduce the gender difference in sickness absence. This holds both for sickness absence in general and for major diagnostic categories. A single exception is psychological diagnoses: there is some tendency for women to be overrepresented in jobs with high levels of absence due to psychological conditions.