Worse paid Unfair wages endanger women's health

Depression, diabetes, heart problems: health risks for women due to unfair wages

Last year, a study showed that women are significantly more ill than men. The difference in the sexes is apparently also explained by income. According to a recent study, unfair wages endanger women's health. You have an increased risk of stress-associated diseases.

Increased risk of illness due to heavy workload

Stress in the workplace, according to experts, has a variety of negative health effects. Research has shown that this increases the risk of cardiovascular disease. In addition, a high workload on the job is associated with a significantly increased risk of type 2 diabetes, as scientists from Helmholtz Zentrum München reported a few years ago. Sick, however, does not only make the workload, but also the unequal treatment in the payment of labor: According to a recent study, women's health risk increases when they are unfairly paid.

According to a recent study, unfair wages endanger women's health. You have an increased risk of stress. (Image: Boggy / fotolia.com)

Stress disorders due to unfair income

Women who find their incomes unfair over a longer period of time are at a much greater risk of contracting stress disorders such as depression, diabetes mellitus, or heart problems.

For men who feel unfairly remunerated, this risk is lower. This is confirmed by a study based on data from the long-term study socio-economic panel (SOEP) representative of Germany at the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW) Berlin.

The study was recently published in the journal Healthcare.

Thousands of workers interviewed over the years

To find out how an unfair income affects health, a group of health and social scientists from the University of Applied Sciences Ravensburg-Weingarten analyzed the data of 5657 gainfully employed men and women interviewed between 2005 and 2013 in the long-term SOEP study were.

Among other things, since 2005 they have provided information every two years on what income levels they would consider fair.

In addition, every two years since 2009, they have answered the question of whether a doctor has diagnosed a stress-related condition. These conditions include depression, diabetes mellitus and heart problems as well as asthma and high blood pressure.

Context in women more pronounced

The result of the study shows that the longer the respondents rated their income as unfair, the more often they were diagnosed with a stress-associated illness. For the affected men, however, this relationship was much weaker than for women.

"The biggest risk of contracting a stress-related illness is for women who work full-time and feel permanently unfairly rewarded," says social scientist Claudia Boscher, one of the authors.

Even if these women rated their income only once as unfair in the course of the SOEP survey, the likelihood that they would report the diagnosis of a stress disorder in the subsequent study period was significantly higher than that of women who had consistently considered their income to be fair. (Ad)