Women’s long work hours linked to alarming increases in cancer, heart disease

[Ultralight]

This is worth a read, for sure!

https://news.osu.edu/news/2016/06/16/overtime-women/

"Work weeks that averaged 60 hours per week or more over three decades appear to triple the risk of diabetes, cancer, heart trouble and arthritis for women, according to new research from The Ohio State University."

[mschrisgo2]

Even without reading the article, it makes sense to me that long work hours would increase risk of disease. Long work hours -> not enough sleep. Sleep -> rejuvenation of the body at the cellular level. No rejuvenation -> disease. Pretty basic biology, actually.

[sweetana3]

Add not enough exercise, long time stress, improper diet...................

[Aqua Blue]

Wouldn't this include most women? Most of the women I know worked full time and had a second full time job with children, husband and house to care for. Most of them do this for at least 30 years.

[Ultralight]

Wouldn't this include most women? Most of the women I know worked full time and had a second full time job with children, husband and house to care for. Most of them do this for at least 30 years.

That sounds like a form of punishment. 30 years...?! Unfathomable.

[ApatheticNoMore]

Wouldn't this include most women? Most of the women I know worked full time and had a second full time job with children, husband and house to care for. Most of them do this for at least 30 years.

Well the article was for jobs with an over 40 hour week and especially an over 50 hour week (that's time at the job). So I don't know, 40 hour a week jobs still exist and this would not include women who had them. The average work week is still under 40 hours and less for women than men (this is partly because of people who need full time work and can't find it, not so much that everyone who wants to work less is, it's feast or famine of course).

I know it's getting harder and harder to find jobs that are just 40 hours, as overtime (usually unpaid) is the baseline expectation at many jobs, but it exists. 30 years is a bit long, so you are responsible for kids for say 18 years (possibly more financially but not in terms of heavy parenting responsibilities), it depends on the spacing and number of kids I guess, but 30 - those kids have to be spaced quite far apart.


Add not enough exercise, long time stress, improper diet...................

oh absolutely, no time to exercise (not even to walk and that's easier than going to the gym), serious stress, no time to make food so of course the diet goes downhill (not to mention stress eating that may happen depending)

[jp1]

It would be interesting to see a study of men working REALLY long hours, like 90 plus per week over the longterm and see if that caused them to bump up in terms of health risks to match the women who are working 60+ hours in this study. Maybe then it would be possible to say, at least somewhat definitively, that the women's role in caring for the family/home responsibilities is the equivalent of X hours of work outside the home.

[Selah]

When I was a young English teacher in Finland, I had some female executives as students. I wanted them to practice conditional tenses, so I asked them, "If you could choose any period in history to have been born in, when would that be, and why?" (They were supposed to answer "I would live in XXXX, because then I would have been able to...." or whatever.)

There was a long silence while everyone was thinking about her response. Finally, one dryly answered, "I would have been born twenty years in the future." Ha!