Female absenteeism is not just about child care

Eve Tahmincioglu • Profile • E-mail

The good news: Workers are calling in sick less often than they did just a decade ago.

The bad news: Women are still absent nearly twice as often as their male counterparts in the workplace.

It’s been a perpetual problem: Women tend to call in sick more often than men. But the why — even though you may think you know the answer — isn’t that clear cut, nor should it be.

The obvious answer from human resource experts, employers, employees and even us in the media is always that “working moms have most of the responsibilities at home,” and that translates into female employees having to take sick days to tend to sick kids.

Indeed, new Labor Department data shared with msnbc.com seem to support this to a degree.

“Both married and unmarried women with children report a higher rate of absences than those without children,” says Terence McMenamin with the department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics. Among single dads, the absentee rate is also higher than the rate for men without children.

What’s interesting, McMenamin points out, is that married men with kids actually report a lower rate of absences than men without children. It was so surprising to this labor data expert that he checked back to 2000 and found the trend is consistent for the past six years.

Before you pat yourself on the back, having guessed that child rearing is what has many women calling in sick, McMenamin surmises there must be many other factors contributing to the high rate among women.

“Even among people who have no children at home,” he adds, “the reported absence rate is higher among women than among men.”

Making assumptions on why women call in sick can be detrimental to the advancement of women in the workplace, says Eric Patton, an assistant professor of management at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia.

As part of his research on how workplace absence is perceived, Patton studied a century’s worth of New York Times articles that dealt with the issue. He found 3,000 articles on the topic.

“Whenever it was an article about women’s absenteeism it was about gender. If it was about men and absenteeism, gender was not brought up,” he says.

That focus on gender, he adds, has created a situation where co-workers and managers expect women to be absent more often, and that, in turn, can creates an air of unreliability around female employees.

Patton and his co-author Gary Johns found that elevated absentee rates for women could not be fully explained by health, family or job issues."

Instead the researcher postulated that social expectations have created an "absence culture" for women that may be a factor.

"This absence culture for women may partially legitimize absenteeism for this group and attenuate perceptions of deviance surrounding women’s absence," the researchers said. "At the same time, such an absence culture, regardless of whether it leads to actual higher absenteeism for particular women, may also be harmful to women in other ways.”

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