BlogHer - Do You Take More Sick Days Than Your Male Colleagues? - Comments

I agree with your last comment

Trish Robinson — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 09:04:26 -0600

When I was reading this, I thought the same thing: Why do people think it's admirable to come to work and infect everyone else? Because corporate america promotes it. No one is encouraged to take a sick day when they are contagious. Nothing makes me angrier than to hear someone brag that they have never taken a sick day when I can remember them coming to work and sneezing and coughing all over the office and making everyone else sick.

I had a really bad experience at my job 3 years ago when I was going through a custody trial. I had worked there 10 years and never used all my sick time and I had to continually take off work and I was told that my sick days were for illness, not for personal problems. Gee, I thought that's why they were called "personal days." So I asked the HR Director if, instead of telling the truth about why I needed to be off,which allowed me to let them know ahead of time that I needed to off and plan for my absense, if I should just wait until the last minute and called in with a fake illness? She said that would be more acceptable, to be sick.Unbelievable!

Trish

It's all about the spin

Elana Centor — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 05:02:31 -0600

ONe of the key things that struck me about Eve's piece on MSNBC is that the experts connected sick days to lack of performance. The purpose of my last piece was to look at the statistics and come up with a different conclusion. To me the conclusion exactly what you say: women are more health conscious, perhpas more considerate of other employees in not wishing to infect the world.

Now, if corporations would praise those that don't infect the world and send sneezing,wheezing, coughing, moaning employees home, maybe those "sick day" numbers would be what they would be: numbers.

elana
Blogher Contributing Editor,Business&CareersFunnyBusiness

Your fourth to last...

nelle2nelle — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 21:26:10 -0600

paragraph is key. Obviously women do still take more time then men for sick kidlets and family members, though that has changed a bit over the last 20 years. With sick protocol, being considerate of co-workers *and* having the presence of mind to realise the world will not screech to a halt with a day off, probably plays a significant role in this.

Men are more inclined to believe showing when sick is a sign of strength and commitment, which is silly if the end result is half the office will be out the following week. And women are more interested in and aware of health issues,
so it follows there would be more awareness.

Society is still undecided over what it wants our work ethic to be. Is it really healthy to work 80 hours a week? It might count as a positive in one area, but lots of baggage comes with that mentality. Sick time is one element of this culture of more is better. I suspect women have (no pun intended) a healthier perspective and balance. At some point we as as a society are going to have to realise life isn't exclusively about work. When I see studies like this, I wonder what the real intent is, because it is being portrayed as a net negative for women, and I'm not sure if that is a sound conclusion.

nelle

Outcome based assessments

alyssaroyse — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 20:51:00 -0600

This is such an interesting subject to me, as it uses the pervasive measure of work as "time spent doing something" rather than "what got done." Probably 10 years ago, when I was writing business features for the Saint Louis Post-Dispatch, i wrote an interesting series of articles about changing personal technology and how it should enable employers to evaluate workers by the outcome of the labor rather than the location or quantity of it. I believed, at the time, that it could profoundly shift the the way we work, and the way we define work.

Namely, if I hire someone to design a house, then i evaluate them based on whether or not they designed a house. Not where they designed it, not when they designed, simply that they did design it.

But I didn't take in to account how hard it is for people to "trust" that something is getting done if they can't see it. Or the "injustice" colleagues would feel if two people charged with teh same task were able to accomplish that task in vastly different times. If Susan gets done in 3 hours something that it takes Peter 6 hours to do, then Peter feels that Susan is getting off easy.

In my mind, that's just nonsense. They both got their job done. If we judge people by the outcomes of their labor, then the rest of it is moot.

Sure, it could be a slippery slope. If the standard was set by Susan's behavior, then most other's would get overworked, but I don't think that that is an insurmountable problem. Surely we can figure that out and relax about the dehumanizing metrics of the corporate machine.

Interestingly, when e have had to write employment contracts for our company, I have never included things like vacation time, sick days, office hours. Simply, "this is your job, get it done." I've hired really talented people who seem to be averaging something seemingly absurd like 9 or 10 weeks of vacation..... But you know what, they're getting their jobs done. And they're really happy. And really productive. And really dedicated......

And it's a good thing, because there's snow falling in the mountains. And we're all skiers, so I'm sensing a lot of massive cases of Snow Hysteria coming on (and it's impossible to work in that condition.) (Actually, now that I think of it, some of our biggest breakthroughs came from conversations that our Director of Technology and I had on chair lifts.)

___________
Alyssa Royse
JUST CAUSE
make some good news!
www.JustCauseIt.com

Do You Take More Sick Days Than Your Male Colleagues?

Elana Centor — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 07:16:10 -0600

When you are a consultant working out of your home,debating whether or not to take a sick day is not a huge business issue. Since many of us tend to have unhealthy work habits anyway, a sick day may simply mean working in bed, taking a few naps, and not bothering to brush our hair or get out of our jammies.

But sick days are a big deal for anyone who gets a regular paycheck every other Friday. The latest research does little to calm the gender wars incorporate America because it finds that all women--regardless of marital status,age, or whether they have children, take more sick days then their male colleagues. The emphasis is on American.

As it turns out, a study in Europe shows that European men hold the prize for taking the most sick days.

Sweden also stands out in the study by Gimeno and Amick because it is one of only three countries in the EU — along with Finland and Belgium — where more women reported taking a sick day than men.

In all the other 12 countries, men were more likely to report taking a sick day, often by a large margin.

Austria had the largest disparity, with 20.4 percent of men reporting having taken a sick day, compared with just 12.1 percent of women.

In Britain, it was 13.3 percent for men and 10 percent for women. In Portugal, it was 10.1 percent for men and 6.8 percent for women.

What explains the difference? Are women the stronger sex after all? The authors say they don't really know.

So here's something that the U.S. and Europe have in common. American researchers are scratching their heads trying to attribute why women in the U.S. take more sick days. They have no solid explanation.

Eve Tahmincioglu writing extensively about this issue on on her blog for MSNBC.com reports,

Making assumptions on why women call in sick can be detrimental to the advancement of women in the workplace, says Eric Patton, an assistant professor of management at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia.

As part of his research on how workplace absence is perceived, Patton studied a century’s worth of New York Times articles that dealt with the issue. He found 3,000 articles on the topic.

“Whenever it was an article about women’s absenteeism it was about gender. If it was about men and absenteeism, gender was not brought up,” he says.

That focus on gender, he adds, has created a situation where co-workers and managers expect women to be absent more often, and that, in turn, can creates an air of unreliability around female employees.

Maybe its our philosophy about sick days. It's like seeing the very expensive pair of shoes you've been coveting all season on deep discount and walking away without buying them. Who would do that?

If a company has factored in your sick days into their bottom line calculations, why shouldn't you take the time you are entitled to?

While I can't remember how many sick days I technically had on my first job as a reporter at WWBT TV in Richmond, Virginia, I know that I thought it would be stupid to not use every single one of them. And I did.

In fact, it was my news director who encouraged me to take "mental health" days. I have no idea if he shared this concept,which was probably considered quite forward in 1973, with all the male reporters. I didn't care. I wanted me some mental health days and I had a boss who said use those sick days and refresh.

Luanne At Fifty is a proponent of the mental health day.

When I was teaching, we were allotted ten sick days a school year. For me, maybe one out of ten would be used for an actual personal illness. Another might be used for a family member's illness. A few would be used throughout the year to catch up on grading papers or planning. But the best use of a sick day was when I took a mental health day. Today I took a mental health morning.No, I'm not actually employed any more outside the home. But I still remember that feeling, that thrill that accompanies "playing hooky". Today I felt the urge coming on, so I went with it.

While many of us have the luxury of taking a mental health day, far too many people don't have the option to take a sick day at all. It is estimated that less than half of working Americans have paid sick days.
For Halloween,Katie Bethell and Nanette Fondas of MomsRising.org wrote a post on Huffington about what really scares women.

"I'm a single mom in TX, with a nine-year-old son with health problems. I've been at my job for a little more than two years. When I was hired, my boss knew I had a son with health issues, and knew that I don't have a support system here to help out with child care. Over the summer, my son (in a very short amount of time) got a virus that made him projectile vomit (and therefore he couldn't go to daycare); then he sprained his ankle (meaning on field trip days at daycare he couldn't go, so he had to come to work with me); then he came down with strep throat, meaning (once again) I had to stay home with him. My boss came up to me after the latest episode and basically told me to choose my job or my kid. I was told if I miss any more work (although I had only missed a few days), I could lose my job. When I pointed out that sick days were included in my benefits, he replied that those sick days were for me, not my kid!"

Writing on the Chicago Mom blog, Veronica asks the question, "What would you do to keep your job?"

Screw the mommy wars, we're talking about choosing between a sick kid with a 102 degree temperature and reporting to your hourly job where you live paycheck-to-paycheck without sick days. Rhonda Present, Founder & Director of ParentsWork, recalls to us in the latest newsletter: A few weeks ago, I was in a coffee shop working on my laptop when I noticed a little girl around five or six years old sitting alone at a table. She seemed to be entertaining herself with the piles of coloring books and toys spread out in front of her. Just as I was wondering where her parents might be, she called out "hi Daddy" to a uniformed man who appeared behind the sales counter. Could it be "Take Your Daughter to Work Day?" No, that doesn't come until April, I thought. So, there must be some other reason for the girl being here. In my never-ending quest to understand and find solutions to the challenges parents face in juggling work and family life, I decided to ask the father about his situation. He explained that he is a single parent and that his daughter had been home from school sick all week. His own mother was going to come in from out of town to help but had to cancel in the last minute. So, he had no other choice but to bring his sick child to work with him.

During a brief phone conversation about the findings that women take more sick days then men, Eve Tahmincioglu of MSNBC.com and I speculated why women take more sick days. Since the experts are clueless it seemed like a reasonable conversation to have.

We discussed the obvious: It could be that all women do more caregiving--- either for parents, aunts & uncles and/or children.I offered up unpleasant menstrual cycles. Eve wasn't eager to go down that road saying she had never missed work because of her period. Okay,I did once but that was a perimenopause situation and it was just for a few hours. Eve did share that the research indicates more women suffer from auto-immune diseases which could contribute to more sick days.

Then we turned the conversation to common courtesy. The fact is it's rude to come to work when you are contagious. It just makes everyone else sick. Women understand this. We are not embarassed to say that a bug has the better of us. We are more interested in protecting the well being of the entire office than demonstrating how tough we are to work through walking pneumonia.

Women understand that if the guy in the next cubicle sneezes and coughs his way through the day there's a very good chance that not only will she get sick but her kids will too. So instead of missing one or two days from work, she'll have to miss several thanks to the macho guy who refused to call in sick.

Women should be applauded and rewarded for their good sense and their diligence in protecting the entire workplace from an epidemic that could create deadline horrors and unhappy customers and clients.

So the next time a woman calls in sick,remember she is staying away for the good of the team. It's the ultimate expression of corporate citizenship.

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toothpastefordinner

Elana blogs a FunnyBusiness