Self-rated health amongst male and female employees in Sweden: a nationally representative study.

PURPOSE

Self-rated health (SRH) is a well-established measure within social epidemiology. However, most studies on SRH tend to be amongst the general population, where SRH has been found to be lower in women than in men. Few studies have specifically investigated patterns of SRH just within an employed population. The purpose of this study was to (1) investigate whether there are gender differences in reporting suboptimal SRH in an employed Swedish population and (2) study whether these differences could be explained by socio-economic, work-, health- and/or lifestyle-related factors.

METHODS

This study is cross-sectional analysis of data from the 2008 wave of Swedish Longitudinal Occupational Survey of Health, a nationally representative cohort of the Swedish working population. This study includes the responses of 9,756 employed individuals. Logistic regression analyses were performed.

RESULTS

After adjusting for age, income and working hours (full vs. part time), men had significantly higher odds of suboptimal SRH than women OR 1.38 (95 % CI 1.22-1.55). With stepwise inclusion of health factors such as long-standing disease, sleep quality and fatigue, the OR for men increased to 1.65 (95 % CI 1.44-1.89). Gender differences in reporting suboptimal SRH were attenuated to 1.29 (95 % CI 1.11-1.51) with the inclusion of lifestyle factors. However, they remained significant after inclusion of all explanatory variables.

CONCLUSIONS

In contrast to findings in general population studies, our results show that men in employment have higher odds of suboptimal SRH than their female counterparts. As SRH is an important indicator of health with a strong association with mortality, an excess risk of suboptimal SRH amongst employed men shows that more attention should be paid to men's health in the workplace.