Female Cancer Patients and Caregivers

Working women who have a cancer history, or who have some responsibility for the care of relatives with cancer, often face a cluster of attitudes and behaviors in their employers and co-workers to which individuals touched by other kinds of illness are not exposed. Patients and caregivers may find that others in the work environment are compassionate and helpful in many ways, but may also encounter considerable hostility and fear expressed verbally or as shunning or other attitudinal problems in the worksite. They may also be targets of overt or covert discrimination. These problems are explored using data from three recent studies on workplace experiences of white collar and blue collar workers who had recovered from cancer, and of former pediatric cancer patients.