Workplace Authority and Women’s Birth Outcomes

• In Event: 381 - Section on the Sociology of the Family Refereed Roundtable Session and Business Meeting
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 10. Work and Family: Session II

Abstract

The lens of occupational demands and resources is often used to understand how work stress influences workers’ well-being. Recent work has investigated how this stress model may operate in different gendered contexts, and shown that certain work characteristics that are commonly understood as resources, such as job authority and responsibility, can fail to provide a protective health advantage to women. Pregnant women that work throughout their pregnancy represent a specific sub-population that faces additional implications from occupational stress. Research has demonstrated a link between the experience of highly stressful events and negative birth outcomes, but it is unclear what the consequences of work authority are for women’s birth outcomes. This project analyses whether pregnant women in jobs characterized by high authority and control experience an advantage when it comes to women in low authority jobs. Using the NLSY’97, the author employs logistic regression to study how occupational characteristics associated with authority and control affect pregnant women’s risk of having a low birth-weight infant. The results provided mixed support for the idea that women in high authority and control positions experience their leadership roles as a health liability rather than a health benefit. Working in a higher decision-making job was consistently found to be protective against having a low birth-weight infant. At the same time, women that were in jobs that involved both high levels of responsibility for other workers while regularly facing strict deadlines were at greater risk of giving birth to a low birth weight infant.

Author

• Ellyn Arevalo Steidl, University of Texas