Potential role stressors for women

 

4 potential role stressors for women:

1.         Maternal-role vulnerability includes demands of maternal role, spousal role, and care-giver to elderly role.

i.          Maternal role

Women with their oldest child under 5 years often show more symptoms of disorder.  It is the ease with which the roles of employment and parental responsibilities are combined that affect women’s mental health. Research reveals that women having positive relationship with their children tend to experience low level of distress, independent of the quality of their work role.  Women in low-status positions, facing frequent dislocations and disruptive lives have higher mortality and morbidity rates.

ii.             Spousal-role

More stress is felt by the woman in a typical dual-earner family because child-care and housework continues to be considered her responsibilities, even when she is employed full-time.  The degree of husband’s participation in child-care and household responsibilities contributes to the health of employed wives. Women’s psychological well-being is affected not by children per se but also by the difficulty in arranging quality child-care including husband’s sharing of parental responsibility.

iii.            Elder-care-giver role

Women are the spousal care-givers because of marital patterns where husbands are typically older than their wives.  Societal attitudes still assign responsibility for care-giving to women who continue to provide bulk or elder-care regardless of their employment status.  In addition to having substantial care-giving responsibilities at home, women employed in extended care-giving occupations tend to bear exorbitant cost of caring measured in terms of emotional distress, toll on physical health, and strain in general well-being.

 

2.         Work-vulnerability includes job closure; part-time work; and ethnic; and  racial tensions at work contributing to economic stranglehold for women

i.           Job closure is a constrain inherent in a job.  For example, absence of significant opportunities for advancement and limited outlets for the expression of their talents and abilities.

ii.          Part-time working women seem to experience a sense of exclusion from organizational and interpersonal skill enhancement opportunities and face continued job insecurity.

iii.         Ethnic and racial tensions at work, caused by prejudicial attitudes about cultural background and/or skin color, contribute to negative workplace atmosphere of unwarranted criticism, firing, ostracism, disrespect, humiliation, and hostile social environment.

 

3.         Perceived quality of role demands and role conflict.  Subjective perception of multiple roles performed has more of an influence on mental health than the actual roles performed

 

4.         Influence of personal resources: social support, perception of personal control, coping strategies, sex-role orientation, availability of quality day care, and employment resources.

i.          Personal control

The presence of personal control is found to be inversely related to negative mental health outcomes.  Perception of internal locus of control will add significantly to the prediction of psychological wellbeing associated with happiness and self-esteem when age, education, and income are controlled.

ii.          Social support

4 major types of functional social support are:

a.     Esteem or emotional support conveys that a person is esteemed, valued, and accepted.

b.     Informational support includes advice or defining and explaining a situation to another person.

c.     Social companionship includes fulfillment of an individual’s psychological needs for belongingness and spending of time with someone in social/recreational activities.

d.     The tangible support includes financial or material assistance given to another person, or some services rendered to him/her.

iii.         Sex-role orientation

Sex-role traits appear to be important in protecting mental health.

iv.        Employment resources

In order to maximize women potential for productivity, employers must respond to the emerging needs of families.  Providing quality and affordable child care, flexible scheduling, job sharing, parental leave, lenient sick leave, and tax credits is needed.  It must be recognized that family needs cannot be dismissed as merely a “women’s problem”.

v.         Coping strategies

Stress can be reduced by the following strategies:

a.     Stressor management is a problem-focused coping strategy that deals with stressors before they have an impact on the person or family.

b.     Stressor avoidance is an emotion-focused or avoidance coping strategy which is directed toward modifying one’s responses to an apparently unchangeable situation.

c.     Stress resistance building is an effort to mobilize strength-building to prepare to cope better with stress.

d.     Stress reaction management includes preventing a person’s response to stressor from compounding the problem further.

 

SHARED FROM:

 Sarla Sharma, (1999),"Multiple-Roles and Women's Health: A Multi-Linear Model", Equal Opportunities International, Vol. 18 Iss: 8 pp. 16 - 23