Working women and stress

Kirushanthy KOUSTHUPAMANY

Stress is a part and parcel of everybody’s life. Women also suffer from stress at almost all times but there are certain specific conditions that might lead to some special kind of stress.

These conditions include pregnancy, menopause and familial strife. But, nowadays with the rapid increase in number of working woman, a new kind of stress has overshadowed others. This is stress due to pressure of work and working environment that a woman faces.

A working woman is required to drag double responsibilities- that of the home as well as at the work place.

Pressure of meeting deadlines or targets and constant fear of getting scolded by the boss makes it impossible to strike a balance between both these responsibilities. It most often results in stress and anxiety.

Sometimes, women end up feeling guilty of their negligence towards home. This stress often results in imitation insomnia and mood fluctuations. If you are a working woman under stress you are likely to experience constant headache. Fatigue is also one of the signs of stress.

In work place, job stressors commonly include job/task demands (work overload, lack of task control), organizational factors (poor interpersonal relations, unfair management practices, discriminatory hiring practices), and physical conditions (noise).

Additional sources of stress include financial and economic factors, conflict between work and family roles, sex-specific stressors (sexual harassment), training and career development issues, and poor organizational climate (values, communication styles, etc).

Stress can cause psychological (affective and somatic responses, job dissatisfaction), behavioral (sleep problems, absenteeism), or physical (changes in blood pressure) reactions. Prolonged exposure to job stressors may produce psychological and physical illnesses, such as depression and coronary heart disease.

There is no evidence that a particular job stressor will result in a particular acute stress reaction or illness. Rather, a range of health symptoms can be associated with workplace stressors.

Controlling occupational stress

Occupational stress interventions can focus either on the individual worker or on the workplace. Individual interventions may consist of training in coping strategies, progressive relaxation, or other stress management techniques, the goal of which is to help the worker deal more effectively with occupational stress.

This type of intervention has been the most common form in developed nation’s countries workplaces. Some stress management programs have been shown to be effective in reducing symptoms of stress, but because they do not remove the sources of workplace stress, they may lose effectiveness over time.

Healthcare professionals may find it difficult to diagnose and treat occupational stress-related health problems for a number of reasons. Patients often fail to identify workplace factors as potential sources of symptoms because they may be unaware of the link.

Additionally, symptoms arising from workplace stressors are nonspecific and do not constitute an identifiable syndrome. Finally, health care professionals are generally not trained to inquire about or to recognize occupational stress.

However, when recognized, occupational stress-related symptoms or illnesses can be successfully treated. For example, psychotherapy has been shown to successfully reduce symptoms and increase self-esteem and job satisfaction in workers suffering from job-related depression.

The same caution exists here, however, as with stress management interventions, in that symptoms may recur if the worker continues to be exposed to the occupational stressors.

The most effective way of reducing occupational stress is to eliminate the stressors through organizational and job redesign interventions.

Effective forms of job redesign include increasing job control by allowing workers to participate in decision making, increasing skill use by expanding job activities, and reducing work role conflict by clarifying job roles and responsibilities.

Organizational changes that may be particularly beneficial for women are expanding promotion and career ladders, introducing such family support programs as flexible schedules and dependent care programs and introducing clear, accessible, and enforced policies against sex discrimination and sexual harassment.

Better-paying jobs

Increased education and work experience enable women to enter more desirable and better-paying jobs with better career prospects.

Unless organizations have and enforce policies that ensure equitable hiring and promotion regardless of sex, however, career and pay differentials will continue to exist between men and women.

Similarly, organizations that do not take steps to prevent sexual harassment send the message that harassment and discrimination are acceptable. Such policies or organizational ‘cultures’ can have implications for the organizational bottom line as well as for worker health and well-being.

Key components of organizational health (high productivity combined with low levels of worker stress and ill health) include valuing diversity and having a commitment to employee growth and development. Research has shown that workplaces that value diversity and actively discourage harassment and discrimination against women are preferred by men as well as women.

Similarly, organizations with family responsive human resources policies, such as flexible work scheduling, family leave policies, and child care assistance, appear to engender higher levels of commitment and attachment among their employees regardless of the extent to which the employees actually use the programs.

Found that supportive family policies give workers more control over the factors that produce work-family conflict, resulting in improved mental and physical health.

(The writer is an Assistant Lecturer, Eastern University, Sri Lanka.)