Taking Gender into Account in Occupational Health Research: Continuing Tensions

Abstract Thinking about women’s occupational health reveals tensions that are involved in doing all occupational health research. By ‘tensions’ we mean conflicting pressures that are not easily or perhaps ever resolved. Recognising such tensions can lead to better science, even when the underlying issues persist. Based on research about women’s occupational health, this paper identifies a series of tensions that have become sources of conflicting pressures within this specific field and which have more general implications for occupational health and, indeed, public health research: sex vs. gender; universal patterns vs. context-specific knowledge; women as a group vs. particular groups of women; quantitative studies vs. qualitative studies; male-female comparisons vs. the study of women; short-term health effects vs. long-term health effects. The tensions identified here are not intended as a finite list but rather as a starting point for the explicit recognition of tensions within specific research projects. Many of these tensions are revealed during interdisciplinary collaborations and need to be understood through such collaborations.