Working Safely in the Trades as Women: A Qualitative Exploration and Call for Women-Supportive Interventions.

BACKGROUND: Construction work offers women economic advancement and self-fulfillment opportunities, but multiple barriers prevent their increased representation in the industry. This study used qualitative methods to identity key physical and psychosocial safety hazards affecting tradeswomen. METHODS: Three focus groups were held in 2015 with 19 tradeswomen in Washington State. Groups discussed workplace hazards and solutions to make the trades safer for women. Discussions were recorded, transcribed, and two independent reviewers analyzed themes. RESULTS: Participants identified myriad physical and psychosocial hazards including a dangerous work environment, inadequate personal protective equipment, gender discrimination, and fear of layoff for reporting concerns. Participants identified mentorship as a potential intervention to overcome some of these barriers. CONCLUSION: Findings suggest that the industry's work environment can be hostile and unsupportive for women, contributing to tradeswomen's injury risk and psychological distress. Future research and interventions should focus on understanding the relationships between and mediating the negative impact of women's physical and psychosocial workplace hazards. Results from these focus groups inspired a randomized control trial to study the impact mentorship has on decreasing physical and psychosocial hazards for women in construction, and improving retention.

Gendered Safety and Health Risks in the Construction Trades.

Objectives: Despite women's increased representation in the overall workforce, construction remains a male-dominated industry. Prior studies have noted that the hazardous workplace environment combined with a culture that can be discriminatory and openly hostile can threaten women workers' health and safety. However, little information exists about the current physical and psychosocial hazards at work affecting tradeswomen. Methods: We examined differences in workplace exposure between women and men, and the association of these exposures with self-reported stress and work injury, in order to highlight how gendered conditions of work negatively affect tradeswomen's health. A holistic view of health that included the influence of both home and work spheres as well as hazards related to women's social experience was considered. Almost 300 workers (198 tradeswomen and 93 tradesmen) throughout Washington State completed surveys. We used descriptive statistics to compare exposures between genders, and logistic regression to model the association between psychosocial exposures and injury and stress outcomes. Results: We found that women were significantly more likely than men to report high perceived stress (31 and 18%, respectively) and being injured at work in the past year (31 and 12%, respectively). Ten of the 12 work-related psychosocial exposures were found to be associated with either stress (job strain, gender and age discrimination, bullying, work/life balance, isolation, sexual harassment, safety climate, and social support) or injury (gender discrimination, bullying, overcompensation, and sexual harassment) for women. Conclusions: The industry continues to lag in supporting tradeswomen's health and safety needs. This study suggests that multiple exposures (including discrimination, overcompensation, and work/life balance) have an important impact on worker well-being. The findings underscore the complex interaction of gender, psychosocial exposures, and occupational risks, and indicate areas for intervention.

Interactions of emotion and anxiety on visual working memory performance.

It is a widely observed finding that emotion and anxiety interact; highly stressed or anxious individuals show robust attentional biases towards external negative information. More generally, research has suggested that exposure to threatening stimuli, as well as the experience of acute stress, also may impair top-down attentional control and working memory. In the current study, we investigated how the influence of emotion and anxiety may interact to influence working memory performance. Participants were required to encode the orientation of four simple shapes, eight, or four shapes while filtering out four other irrelevant shapes from memory. Before memory displays, an irrelevant neutral or fearful face cue also was presented. Memory performance was found to interact with self-reported state anxiety and cue valence; on neutral cue trials, state anxiety was negatively correlated with performance. This effect was absent following a fear cue. In addition, filtering efficiency was negatively associated with state anxiety solely following a fear cue. Our findings suggest that state anxiety's influence to visual working memory can be strongly modulated by external signals to threat. Most crucially, rather than anxious individuals having greater difficulty rejecting external threatening information, we observed that external threat may in its own right generally impair filtering efficiency in anxious individuals.