Unemployment Kills Men Dead
Hammarström A, Gustafsson PE, Strandh M, Virtanen P, & Janlert U (2011). It’s no surprise! Men are not hit more than women by the health consequences of unemployment in the Northern Swedish Cohort. Scandinavian journal of public health, 39 (2), 187-93 PMID: 21382857
Conflicting views on the impact of the economic downturn that is affecting much of the industrialised world, with an article in the March 2011 edition of the British Journal of Psychiatry claiming that it is all doom and gloom for us blokes, whereas in this article by Hammarstrom et al. (2011), the alleged gender gap between how men and women respond to being jobless, is held up to be highly suspect. Me thinks that expectations at an individual level, that is, that men assume that they will always be breadwinners and at a societal level, that is, that we all assume the same will be true, leads to this false belief that a man without work just has to do it tougher than a woman, right (2011, p.191 & p.192)?
Apparently, not…
As Hammarstrom et al. (2011) put it…
‘The view that men are the main breadwinners of the family is still heard today in research on the health consequences of unemployment from the Western world. For example, in the recent meta-analysis about the effect of unemployment on mental health the authors [Ke & Moser, 2009] state that ‘masculine idenity is intricately linked to having a job in Western societies and is severely threatened by unemployment’. However, the meta-analysis was based on old studies – about half of them older than 1990 and the oldest dating from the 1960s. The gendered hypotheses are thus expressed without taking the context of the included studies into account. For example, it is well known that women’s participation in the labour force has increased substantially during the last few decades and, thus, the male breadwinner role has decreased in importance’ (p.191).
To be sure, unemploment stinks, particularly when one depends on a wad of cash every week to keep the whole kit and kaboodle of mindless excessive consumerism chugging along: house, car, holiday, the latest gadget, the next best thing. However, to run with the line that men are so religiously socialised into a life of toiling at the coalface to put a roof over their families’ heads and food in their belly every night, is about as quaintly dated as Little House on the Prarie. Yes, the world has kicked on considerably since the 19th century and the reality is that both men and women work for all sorts of reasons and can suffer equally too, when that work is gone.
In the present study, the authors (2011, p.191) found that unemployed women in Sweden were more likely than unemployed men in that country to be afflicted with poorer physical and mental health and surprisingly, perhaps, to hit the bottle and fags more liberally. The biggest hazard for the Swedish men in this study (2011, p.191) seemed to be that their teeth might fall out, since there was a positive association between their unemployment and trips to the dentist. That is, they stopped going. Hardly surprising that, if chair and spit work in that frigid part of the world is anything as cost intensive as it is here, down under.
Rather than jump to the grandiose conclusion that their study ‘proves’ that women are on par or even ahead of men when it comes to the unemployment knocked me down stakes, Hammarstrom et al. (2011, p.188) concede that a) around the world, divergent findings are reported on this phenomenon and that b) that might in part be a product of labour market participation rates. As fate would have it, on a global scale, Sweden has ‘a high participitation rate of women in the labour market’ (2011, p.187). The authors (2011, p.192) suggest and I would say ‘here! Here!’ for that, that what is needed is more nuanced, gender-based research into the aeteiology of health problems…
Blah! Blah! Blah!