‘FEMALE’ JOBS BAD FOR HEART: STUDY
Regardless of your biological sex, doing “female” things such as rearing children and being “sensitive to the needs of others” might be inherently bad for the heart, suggests new research from McGill University.
In a study of 909 patients, researchers found the more “male” they lived, the more likely they were to bounce back from a heart attack.
“The study is asking if (health differences) are due to biology or if it’s really gender characteristics,” said Dr. Louise Pilote, the lead researcher and a professor at medicine at McGill University Health Centre.
While medical science has long studied people by sex, the “novelty” of this study is that it pioneers a new method of sorting patients based purely on “traditionally attributed” gender traits, she said.
The idea is to highlight the “non-biological” differences between male and female heart patients, rather than simply cataloguing them according to their hormones and genitals.
In the study, Sex Versus Gender-Related Characteristics, published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, cardiac patients filled out a questionnaire to gauge where they fell on the “gender index.”
This included such questions as, “For the children that live with you, to what level are you responsible for caring for them?” Another asked how confident participants felt in managing their stress.
Typically, women said they were “more stressed and less confident.”
However, stay-at-home dads tended to give more “female” answers, while women who were the primary breadwinner were more “male.”
Based on the questionnaire, respondents received a score from 0 to 100.
“The lower the score, the more the patient reported characteristics traditionally ascribed to men; and vice versa,” the study says.
Pilote believes she would get a score of 30.
“There’s certain things in my identity, I feel like I’m a woman, but at work I’m a male,” she said.
Ultimately, many more men ended up being counted as female than the other way around.
Of the 636 men surveyed, 32 per cent were slotted into the “characteristics ascribed to women” category, a group that slanted toward childrearers, low-income earners and people doing the majority of household chores.
In the “men” category, only six women made the cut.
Researchers found all those who ended up in the female category were at much higher risk of having a second heart attack.
Being responsible for housework or having a personality that is “shy and sensitive to the needs of others” were female traits found to be closely linked with a higher mortality risk for heart patients, the study concluded.
In seeking explanations, researchers guessed it might be a case of simple anxiety; that being a woman — or living like one — wears out the heart faster.
“Hours of paid work have increased significantly among women in the past 20 to 30 years, which in addition to child care responsibilities, may lead to increased psychosocial stress,” the study said.
A 2009 study by the Japan Public Health Centre found Japanese women raising kids were twice as likely to get heart disease as their counterparts who were married, but childless.