I work at the Centre for Health Equity in the Gender and Women’s Health Unit
at the University of Melbourne and I’m also
1 of the 3 Victorian Research Medical Fellowship recipients.
My research sort of spans across a few different areas,
primarily it's focused on employment, the benefits of employment,
I have a pretty strong focus on men at work, also on people with disabilities,
and how they can or cannot benefit from different types of working arrangements.
I try and do aetiological work which is analysis with big data sets
to try and understand and unpack how employment might influence health
but also I do stuff on the ground, so specifically with prevention community groups
that are trying to improve
employment circumstances for people.
The relationship between gender and mental health is actually a really complex one.
Across the Australian population, like across many populations in the world,
there is gendered segregation into different occupations,
so you find that men are more likely to go into very physical jobs,
they're more likely to go into very high power jobs,
management jobs, whereas women are much more likely to go
into service-related jobs or become health professionals,
become teachers, so that's one thing that's fascinating in and of itself
and we know that each job has its own inherent mental health
risks, you might be able to be really highly creative in a job
but then it might also be really demanding.
And then when you look at something like mental health we know that men in particular
are much more likely, and this has been shown over centuries of sociological work, to be
influenced by external economic factors that are around them and that really hasn't shifted
despite the first research in this area being like two hundred years ago,
we still see men being very influenced by this idea of being
the breadwinner, being dominant at work and these sorts of ideas.
My own work has increasingly become focused on that.
You take an occupation like nursing,
nursing is very highly female dominated
and we know that both men and women have
high rates of suicide in that job.
You take being a medical doctor; it's male dominated, not so much female dominated,
but what you see is the female doctors have higher risk of suicide but not male doctors.
As far as we can understand it's something about the context in which people are working.
We know that female doctors have often spoken about that environment being very masculine
and it's been very difficult for them to work long term particularly after they have a family.
Nursing you might have the opposite problems, so why are men at risk in nursing?
Our current understanding at the moment is that it might be connected to both the stresses in that job,
so how much control people have over the work, their long hours,
whether they're working shift work, all these things we already know are harmful for health,
but might also be connected to how gendered norms are constructed within that workplace.
The other sort of thing that we know too is that access to means is a huge risk factor for suicide,
so both male nurses and female nurses have access to drugs, for example, that they can use to end their life,
similar with female and male doctors, interestingly that the male doctors don't have an elevated rate
even though they've got the same access.
So even though it's a risk I don't think it's the whole explanation
for why there is elevated rates of suicide within specific occupational groups
and then if you switch across and you flip it over to somewhere like construction which have the
highest rates of suicide in Australia, as in many other countries in the world,
they don't have any greater ability to access lethal means to suicide than
the medical profession but they have much higher risk.
We do think that that is primarily connected to the pressures that construction workers are under.
The environment that they work in can be very insecure, one of the first things that's hit
in an economic recession is usually the construction industry
in terms of housing, building, build approval and things like that.
We also know that the environment that they're working in, in terms of how supportive
people are around them, how demanding the job is, the work hours,
is also problematic for construction workers.
Men who strongly adhere to male norms that, like these traditional male norms about masculinity,
are less likely to seek help so they may feel as though they need to be more self-reliant,
they may feel as though work is really, really important to them,
so men adhere to those more are least likely to seek help and may be at greater risk of mental health problems.
I think that wherever you are that there is some universality in terms of risk factors.
We do see very similar patterns of distress by occupation across different areas of the world,
which says to me yes it's a universal thing and I believe those are connected to some of these
fundamental determinants of health that are preventable.
So things like how good the work is that you're doing, that's pretty fundamental to everyone,
things like work that's free of bullying, income, education, these are all fundamental determinants of health
that we can actually intervene on, so that's within a health inequalities perspective
I have focused on one area where in which I believe
we can make real gains and that is employment, we know this is related to people's health
both in the short term and as they get older; a variety of health conditions
It's not just mental health its physical health, chronic health, everything.
So if you can make some gains there you have the opportunity to really improve somebody's life.
We also need to understand whether these things are working from an economic perspective
because programs are expensive to roll out
and I think we have an obligation to say whether these are cost effective or not.
The other thing that I think is fundamental that I would really like to see changed in my life time
is greater attention to the quality of the work that people are doing.
So the amount of control they are having, how well they're treated at work,
the amount of support they have around them,
how secure their work is, all of this we know are fundamental causes of people's general health
and they should be something that employers, governments, policy makers can actually intervene to make better.