Men's Risk-taking Nature
Why do men often work
the most dangerous jobs? Many
theories are surrounding the topic. Is it
because the most dangerous jobs pay well?
Perhaps there’s an internal bias surrounding
the occupation that results in more men being
hired for a specific job over women? Or perhaps it’s
simply because of the dangerous jobs, many of which require
the employee to be working outdoors, doing the physical labour of the sort
(hunting, logging, fishing, piloting and roofing for example), and men
simply happen to enjoy that a lot. What are the stigmas surrounding men’s
health that allude to what and why they face a higher mortality rate than women in the workforce?
It’s not uncommon knowledge that men are more likely to be killed on the job than women, but by how much? What is it about occupations with a male workforce that constitute a marginally higher mortality rate than women in their work fields? First off, the most dangerous occupations available have a workforce dominated by men at over 90%. These occupations include, thus they’re more likely to die on the job over women through sheer volume alone. As an example, in 2017 over 4,700 men were killed at their workplace versus just under 400 women. A fatality rate of 5.7 deaths per 100,000 workers that year, which is nearly 10 times greater than the fatality rate of women, at 0.6 per 100,000.
Now that we know how much more likely men are going to be killed in the workplace than women, now the question is why? Of the various possibilities, one theory is that men are socialized to be the primary income of the family, and are therefore more willing to work in more dangerous occupations because said occupations often pay well. However, this theory holds less weight when it turns out that of the dangerous occupations that have high mortality rates for men, they aren’t even close to being the highest paying jobs. Loggers and Roofers can make around $35k to 50k annually, but that’s not even half of the potential salary of health-related occupations such as nurses, dentists and paediatricians who all have an average annual salary of over $170k as of 2020 statistics.
What if their mortality rate is tied to the employers simply choosing to hire more male workers versus female workers? Another possibility is that dangerous occupations have an internal bias towards hiring male workers versus female workers. While generally, these are less common due to how much easier it is to discern extremely skewed numbers of male versus female works to applications and win sex-based discrimination laws in court, it is not an impossible idea that employers may simply view men as more capable for specific tasks over women.
By Donovan Guh
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