The Effects of Sexism on Women Miners' Mental Health and Job Satisfaction

In the mining industry, women make up only 19.4% of the workers in Canada, 16.4% in Australia, and 13.3% in the USA (Catalyst, 2015). In the present research, we investigated women’s experiences of sexism in this male-dominated industry and how these experiences related to women’s mental health and job satisfaction.

We surveyed 263 women miners from an Australian-based mining company that has operations in Australia, Africa, South America, and South East Asia. Participants responded to items about sexism, sense of belonging, mental health, and job satisfaction. 

Our research focused on two types of sexism: organizational sexism and interpersonal sexism. Organizational sexism refers to structural inequalities in an organization that are connected with opportunities for promotion and career progression, job stability, training, pay, competence, work-life balance, and performance standards. We found that women miners who felt relatively disadvantaged on these dimensions reported poorer mental health and job satisfaction. Hence, a potential strategy to improve women miners’ mental health and job satisfaction may be to reduce their perceived and actual disadvantage on these dimensions. This might be achieved through a combination of structural changes in the workplace (e.g., more opportunities for women miners’ career progression) and/or greater transparency in the gender-based similarities on these dimensions (e.g., publication of workforce statistics demonstrating equality of pay).

Interpersonal sexism refers to inappropriate images of women in the workplace, sexual harassment, and sexist comments. Like organizational sexism, interpersonal sexism was negatively related to mental health and job satisfaction. Interpersonal sexism is more ingrained in wider intergender relations in society, and addressing interpersonal sexism effectively is likely to require a partnership between employers and (male and female) employees.

A third variable that was associated with women miners' mental health and job satisfaction was sense of belonging in the industry. This variable mediated the effects of organizational sexism on job satisfaction. Hence, an additional approach towards improving women miners’ job satisfaction may be to increase their sense of belonging. An increased sense of belonging may be achieved by promoting community events both within the female group of miners (i.e., as a group of “women miners”) and within the industry as whole (i.e., women identifying as “miners”).

We also found some interesting cross-country differences. Women who worked at Australian mine sites reported significantly less organizational and interpersonal sexism and fewer mental health problems than did women who worked at African, South American, and South East Asian worksites. These differences may reflect cross-cultural differences, with Australia’s more progressive Western culture prescribing less sexism and better mental health practices in the workplace.

It is important to note that our study’s cross-sectional correlational design prevents clear conclusions regarding the causal direction of the associations between the variables that we studied. Future research may wish to use longitudinal research designs to address this issue.

For further information about this research, please see the following journal article:

Rubin. M., Subasic, E., Giacomini, A., & Paolini, S. (2017). An exploratory study of the relations between women miners’ gender-based workplace issues and their mental health and job satisfaction. Journal of Applied Social Psychology. doi: 10.1111/jasp.12448 

For an open access self-archived version, please click here.

Social Class Differences in Mental Health: Do Parenting Style and Friendship Play a Role?

It is now well-established that social class and socioeconomic status (SES) are positively related to mental health.  For example, a meta-analysis of 51 studies found that people with a higher SES are less likely to be depressed than people with a lower SES. However, researchers remain unclear about the specific processes that underlie the relation between social class and depression.
 

In some recent research, Benjamin Kelly and I investigated the potential roles of parenting style and friendship in explaining the relationship between social class and mental health. We predicted that people from higher social class backgrounds experience a warmer and more responsive parenting style from their mother and father than students from lower social class backgrounds, who experience a more restrictive, disciplinary, and controlling parenting style. We also predicted that a more responsive parenting style promotes the development of a range of socially-beneficial psychological resources such as self-management and social competence, which enable people to develop more and better quality friendships.  In turn, better friendships were expected to lead to better mental health and well-being due to their stress-buffering effects and beneficial effects on self-esteem, sense of belonging, and perceived social support. Our model is outlined below.

We tested our model using a sample of 397 psychology undergraduate students at a large public Australian university. Consistent with our predictions, we found that:

1. Students with higher social class experienced better mental health and well-being than students with lower social class.
2. Students with higher social class reported their parents to be the warmer and less disciplinary than students with lower social class.
3. Students with higher social class reported better friendships social integration at university than students with lower social class.
4. Students who had experienced a warmer and less disciplinary parenting style reported (a) better friendships and (b) better mental health.
5. Friendship and social integration mediated (statistically explained) the relation between social class and mental health.

Based on this evidence, we concluded that working-class parenting styles may inhibit the development of socially-supportive friendships that protect against mental health problems at university.

Our single cross-sectional study only provides preliminary evidence, and further longitudinal studies that sample from different populations are required in order to arrive at firmer conclusions. However, our initial results suggest two potential interventions for reducing social class differences in mental health in university communities and, potentially other communities if our effects generalize to these communities.  The first is to increase working-class people’s social integration, and I have discussed this issue with regards to working-class students at university elsewhere. The second, more distal intervention is to alter the working-class parenting style in order to make it warmer, more responsive, and less disciplinary. However, any such parenting style intervention needs to take into consideration the impact of an array of sociocultural factors, and we consider these in some depth in our article.

For more information about this research, please see the following open-access article:
 
Rubin, M., & Kelly, B. (2015). A cross-sectional investigation of parenting style and friendship as mediators of the relation between social class and mental health in a university community International Journal for Equity in Health, 14 (1), 1-11 DOI: 10.1186/s12939-015-0227-2