Statistics Canada, Canada’s national statistics agency, released a report on work injuries [PDF] a while back. There were a few things we found interesting. While four percent of all workers experienced some sort of work place injury over the past year, only two percent of the women had. So guys got hurt disproportionately to gals.
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Hear George & Mary-Lynn discuss the injury report stats on The Bigg Success Show! Click the purple player: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download
Hear George & Mary-Lynn discuss the injury report stats on The Bigg Success Show! Click the purple player: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download___
You might hypothesize that perhaps men perform riskier tasks, on average, than women. However, the research showed that men have a higher rate of injury across all job categories.
Can women work harder?
Another point of interest was that, compared to men working less than 35 hours a week, men who work eighty hours a week or more were twice as likely to get injured. Men were forty percent more likely to get hurt if they worked between 45 and 79 hours.
It makes sense, doesn’t it? The more someone works, the more tired they are and the more likely they are to harm themselves somehow. Sounds good, except that it didn’t hold true for women. There was no noticeable difference among women based on the number of hours worked.
Women who worked more than one job experienced more injuries than women who only had one job. There was no difference for men. Finally, we found one in the men’s favor!
Why do we work so much?
Seriously, though, we see that whether we look at hours worked or number of jobs, there is evidence to show that chance of harm increases.
So we wonder: Why do we work so many hours? Why do we need more than one job? In many cases, it’s because of money issues. Might we be better off looking at our budget? Would we better served by adjusting our lifestyles? Then we might not have to work so much and we might not get hurt as much.
More hours. More jobs. Still a lack of money. No extra time. More stress. All of these come into play together.
Speaking of play
Here’s another thing we found very interesting in this report. Only 28% of all “activity-limiting injuries” occurred at work. Now think about that. We spend about half of our waking hours at work, if not more. Yet nearly three-fourths of the accidents that keep us from working happen in our personal lives. What in the world are we doing at home?
The study says that most accidents that occur at work are hand injuries and lower back strain. We don’t know what the accidents are away from work. Are we straining ourselves too much at home?
Maybe instead of a “honey do” list, we should start a “honey don’t” list!
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If 4% of workers had accidents and 2% of women had accidents, then how are men’s accidents disproportionate from that of women? Doesn’t logic and mathematics tell us that 2% men + 2% women = 4% total?
These stories come out every year and are either statistically inaccurate and/or fail to take into consideration several factors.
Please make corrections or detractions.
B –
Thanks for your comment. You raise an interesting question that we looked at before we posted this because we’re not statisticians.
Think about this way – if 2% of all men get hurt and 2% of all women get hurt, then only 2% of all people get hurt, not 4%. For example, if there were 100 workers, split 50/50 between men and women, with 2% of men and 2% of women getting injured, then 1 man and 1 woman would report an injury for a total of 2 people.
If the workforce was evenly dispersed between men and women, and 4% of all the workers were injured, with only 2% of them being women, then 6% of all the men would have to get injured in order for there to be a 4% injury rate among all workers (i.e. for women and men respectively, 50% x 2% + 50% x 6% = 4%). Using the example above, if 1 woman (out of 50, or 2%) reports an injury, then 3 men (out of the 50, or 6%) would have to be injured in order for 4% of all workers to experience an injury.
Since the workforce is disproportionately male, at least in this study (roughly 2/3 men compared to 1/3 women), men reported injuries at less than the 6% rate in the previous paragraph. In fact, about 5% of the men reported an injury. That’s how the 4% is arrived at – 2/3 x 5% + 1/3 x 2% = 4%.
In the interest of time, we didn’t go into all of this detail in our post. We hope this helps clear up any confusion. We thank you for providing a reason to get into these details.