Feminized skills and job recognition: associations with psychological distress and absenteeism

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Purpose The purpose of this study was to explore the relationship between feminized skills, job recognition, psychological distress and absenteeism. It also aimed to assess whether job recognition mediates the relationship between feminized skills and psychological distress and absenteeism. Design/methodology/approach The responses of a sample of 2,323 workers in Québec, Canada, who completed a questionnaire that included items about workload, use of feminized skills, job recognition, psychological distress and absenteeism, were used to conduct path analyses using MPlus software to test direct and indirect associations. Findings The results indicate that using feminized skills is directly and negatively related to job recognition and indirectly related to psychological distress and absenteeism through job recognition. Practical implications Given the prevalence of work-related mental health issues, understanding the relationships between specific job characteristics is essential to proposing appropriate prevention strategies. Understanding the indirect associations between feminized skills, job recognition, psychological distress and absenteeism highlights the importance of providing adequate job recognition to workers who use feminized skills. Increasing job recognition is one way to reward predominantly female jobs adequately, but redressing the historic undervaluation of these jobs requires both organizational and societal changes, including the use of more accurate tools to measure their worth. Our work aspires to help address this need by proposing an exploratory index of feminized skills. Originality/value We propose a measure of feminized skills that allows for a more precise measurement of the efforts and demands associated with predominantly female jobs, which contributes to expanding the job demands-resources and effort-reward imbalance frameworks. We also provide empirical support for an explanatory mechanism behind the relationship between feminized skills and psychological distress and absenteeism.

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