NIOSHTIC-2 Publications Search

Gender disparities in health: strategic selection, careers, and cycles of control.

Moen P; Chermack K

J Gerontol B Psychol Sci Soc Sci. 2005 Oct; 60(Spec Iss 2):S99-S108

https://doi.org/10.1093/geronb/60.Special_Issue_2.S99

20042158

This article proposes a dynamic model of the intersections between gender, health, and the life course incorporating processes of strategic selection--of roles, relationships, and behavior. Men and women make decisions within a tangled web of multilayered, often contradictory, and frequently outdated institutional contexts of opportunity and constraint. Both their decisions and the institutions shaping them reflect prior as well as ongoing socialization and allocation mechanisms. These institutionalized scripts and regimes tend to reproduce gendered biographical paths around two central life foci: paid work (or careers) and unpaid family work (or careers). The gendered nature of occupational and family-care paths, in turn, produces patterned disparities in a constellation of health-related resources, relationships, and risks, as well as feelings of mastery and control. We call for research charting alternative constellations of these gendered health careers, their antecedents, temporal patterning, and consequences.

Workers; Behavior; Employees; Work-operations; Work-organization; Work-practices; Job-analysis; Men; Women; Workplace-studies; Psychological-responses; Attitude; Families

Phyllis Moen, Department of Sociology, University of Minnesota, 909 Social Sciences, 267 19th Avenue South, Minneapolis, MN 55455

20051001

Journal Article

phylmoen@umn.edu

Cooperative Agreement

2006

Cooperative-Agreement-Number-U01-OH-008788

Spec Issue 2

1079-5014

Journal of Gerontological

OR; MN; NE

Portland State University