Mere overrepresentation? Using cross-occupational injury and job analysis data to explain men’s risk for workplace fatalities

Abstract

Historically, male workers have comprised a large proportion of occupational fatalities in the US. A common explanation for this has been that men are overrepresented in more physically hazardous occupations. Yet another potential explanation is that prescribed gender roles and norms contribute to higher rates of male worker fatalities compared with female workers. The purpose of this study was to test the assumption of the overrepresentation explanation, first, by testing the degree to which overrepresentation adequately accounts for men and women’s differing fatality frequencies across various occupations, and second, by exploring gendered worker, occupation, and organizational attributes which may explain variance in the severity of men’s fatality disparity between occupational titles. We used data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and Occupational Information Network (O∗NET). Results indicate that more than 25% of the total occupational fatalities in 2012 occurred outside of what would be expected for equivalent fatality ratios for men and women working in the same occupation. Further, gendered job and worker characteristics significantly predicted variance in men’s relative risk for workplace fatalities across occupations (these characteristics, combined with sex representation, explained 10% of the total variance in men’s relative fatality risk). The results suggest that men may be at increased risk for occupational fatalities when compared to women in the same occupations, and advocate for investigating the role of gender for future research on injury and fatality discrepancies between male and female workers.