Download One-Eyed Science: Occupational Health and Women Workers (Labor And Social Change) fb2

great information on occupational H&S....was for school, but still good to know for workplace.

Karen Messing's book advocates setting up of a fruitful dialogue between those interested in women's health and those interested in occupational health. The author decided to study the interactions of biological and social factors. "Environment", according to Messing, "channels the performance and well-being of biologically divergent populations".
Messing states that the work environment ignores women's needs because tools, workspaces and load factors are geared for men and not women as well. She suggests that rather than finding a worker to fit the job, the job should be made accessible to the workers. She also decries the fact that science treats women's biology in ways that reinforce their subordination in society. Scientific studies about the workplace also tend to forget about the additional work load that women have at home, or to treat it as a reason against women holding certain jobs or not deserving insurance compensation.
This glaring discrimination is obvious in the scientific treatment given to work-related injuries. When men get injured, they get compensation more often than women, because cause and effect can easily be established between, say heavy lifting and a back injury, whereas the repetitive strains that women are subjected to in their jobs are less visible and more cumulative in nature. Moreover, men tend to be promoted out of repetitive types of jobs and have greater control over their work environment and methodology.
Karen Messing believes employers, scientists and insurance companies should be accountable for this state of affairs. She recognises that labour unions work very hard to protect their members, but they do not always have the support of highly paid scientific experts or lawyers to protect the rights of women. She also deplores the fact that an agent, or condition must be proved dangerous before being removed from the workplace or the environment, hence she pushes for a preventive approach. Many scientists opt for scientific certainty thereby relying on evident illness rather than symptoms to determine whether job hazards are to be validated by them. Messing diagnoses a male-gender bias in the scientific community at large.
Karen Messing's "Occupational Health..." contains useful information for researchers who wish to ensure that their methodology is not gendered. However, this jumble of facts and findings can be a bit confusing for other readers such as policymakers, labour union representatives, feminist groups and just plain workers who wish to gain an insight into this most important subject. Hopefully readers, especially scientists, will not be put off by this minor drawback in their quest for a science that has two eyes to see both sides of the question.

The implications of Messing's arguments regarding the disparate orientation of policies and practices, research and research funding, and record keeping regarding workers, is a call to awareness about how bias toward men workers has resulted in omission of women's occupational health issues from research and policy. The thoroughness of her review, the integration of hundreds of studies and the multitude of concrete examples clearly demonstrate the breadth and depth of the problems for parity in occupational health research and remedies.