Women and absenteeism: A smokescreen relationship ?

In the literature, sex is often presented as an individual determinant of sickness absence. A common finding is that women are absent from work more than men. In this article, we examine sex as a variable that can function as a surrogate for certain workplace determinants. Our study is based on a quantitative analysis of the organisational factors (work organisation, working conditions, social relations, and job resources) of sickness absences for both men and women. This study included 14241 men and 10245 women, and our approach essentially consists of applying multinomial logistic regressions to data from the SUMER national survey. The results show that the relationships between sex and absenteeism are weak and significant at p < .10 for long absences ( > 21 days) when one takes the variables of work organisation, working conditions and social relations into account. Furthermore, our results demonstrate that there is a loss of information in the regression for both sexes when compared to regressions for which data on women and men were analysed separately.