As you might expect with the European Union, or most any multinational government agency, a very significantly data-intensive report was released recently.

[Courtesy of EladeManu from Flickr via a Creative Commons license]The theory that comes out of a recent EU-OSHA study is that women are more at risk for workplace incidents than men, which may suggest that workplace safety measures are gender-biased toward men.

It is the kind of thing that will make your eyes cross and serve as a wonderful sleep aid some night. But if you can work your way through it all and check out the pretty graphs and tables featured in the report, you will find some interesting findings in terms of worker safety among men and women in the EU. And this led to some conclusions by EU-OSHA that are thought-provoking for some of us in the U.S. and Canada – could workplace safety be gender-biased?

I can’t possibly get to the bottom line of this report here because here is just too mch to go through, but you can see the report for yourself if you’d like. What I can tell you that, at least in Europe, there seems to be a claim that women are at higher risk for workplace incidents and accidents than their male counterparts overall – which, of course, is broken down by occupation, full-time or part-time work, age, and other factors. While the numbers seem to vary pretty wildly in all these areas across not only the EU but each individual member country, there were a couple numbers that stood out to me.

Overall, women seem to take up about 45 percent of the total work force in Europe, but women’s overall incidence rate per 100,000 employed workers is only about 40 percent of men. However, when EU-OSHA normalized the incidence rates to full-time equivalency employment, the accident rates (a little different than incident rates) is virtually equal, according to the study.

What might all this mean? It’s hard to say, but it seems to me that if all the jobs were normalized into an “average job” in terms of labor, stress, occupational safety and health risks and exposures, that this EU-OSHA study is saying that women are more at risk than men. The charts show that higher-risk occupations like construction and manufacturing have high incidence rates and are dominated by men, while the women-dominated professions like hospitality, retail and care services (day care, elder care) are considered relatively low-risk professions and thus have low incidence rates – but women have a higher rate of incidents in those professions. And the report makes note that a large majority of part-time workers (about 70 percent) are women, so in theory they are actually exposed to consistent risk less often than their male counterparts – yet the adjusted incident rate (at FTE) is nearly equal.

Check out the entirety of the EU-OSHA study and feel free to give us your analysis. What do you think of the data and the report? What do you make of the recommendations the report authors suggested? Is this something that should be evaluated in the U.S. and /or Canada?