McDonough Peggy, Strohschein Lisa
Department of Public Health Sciences, McMurrich Building, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, M5S 1A8, Canada.
Women Health. 2003;38(1):1-20. doi: 10.1300/J013v38n01_01.
Women report more psychological distress than men and recent evidence suggests that this gap increases with age. It has been argued that the widening differential in distress reflects the progressive and cumulative nature of women's disadvantaged work and family roles. Drawing on the cumulative disadvantage hypothesis and social stress theory, we test: (1) whether exposure to chronic stress accounts for an increasingly larger proportion of the gender effect on distress with age; and (2) whether women are increasingly more vulnerable to the effects of chronic stress on distress with age. Data are from the 1994 wave of the Canadian National Population Health Survey, a national probability sample of women and men aged 20 and older (N = 13,798). Exposure to long-term stress helps us understand gender differences in distress for those in their pre-retirement years. However, contrary to the cumulative disadvantage hypothesis, the model became increasingly less likely to explain such differences with age. Gendered vulnerability to long-term stress was not evident in the sample. The implications of these findings are discussed with particular reference to our ongoing efforts to understand health in the context of social structure and subjectivity.
女性报告的心理困扰比男性更多，最近的证据表明，这种差距会随着年龄的增长而扩大。有人认为，困扰方面日益扩大的差异反映了女性在工作和家庭中处于不利地位的角色具有渐进性和累积性。基于累积劣势假说和社会压力理论，我们检验：（1）长期暴露于慢性压力是否在对困扰的性别影响中随着年龄增长占比越来越大；以及（2）随着年龄增长，女性是否越来越容易受到慢性压力对困扰的影响。数据来自1994年加拿大全国人口健康调查，这是一个对20岁及以上男女的全国概率样本（N = 13798）。长期暴露于压力有助于我们理解处于退休前阶段人群在困扰方面的性别差异。然而，与累积劣势假说相反，该模型越来越难以解释随着年龄增长出现的此类差异。在样本中，未发现对长期压力存在性别化的易感性。我们将特别参考我们目前在社会结构和主观性背景下理解健康方面所做的努力，来讨论这些发现的意义。
