Survey: Men's Poor Health, Women's Fault

ByABC News
August 18, 2000, 11:26 AM

V I E N N A, Austria, Aug. 18 -- Its all the fault of hard-working women that the men in their lives are in poor health.

Thats the conclusion drawn from a survey of 3,000 U.S. couples by the University of Michigan. This survey shows how much more dependent husbands are on their wives on health issues, says Ross Stolzenberg, professor of sociology and author of a paper on the survey.

Stolzenberg spoke earlier this week at the American Sociology Meeting in Washington, D.C.

Women Still Caretakers

Wives and girlfriends, he says, are generally the guardians of their mens health and social secretary for the couple.

Problems arise, the survey shows, if the women in the partnership work more than 40 hours a week. The women are not around to remind their partners to look after their health, take their medication, see a doctor, or exercise.

When women work more than 40 hours a week outside the home, men see their health decline by more than 25 percent over a three year period, the survey reveals.

Husbands tend to be socialized to not perform health and social-emotional monitoring and management for anyone at all, not even themselves, Stolzenberg concludes. The truth is that boys spend a lot of time being treated to ignore relatively obvious information about their health.

Men Dangerous to Their Own Health

In plain language, that means that when the little woman is absent, men tend to go out with the guys, hit the booze and become couch potatoes watching sports on television.

No, Stolzenberg says, its not that women threaten their masculinity or make men feel inferior by either working harder or bringing home more money. And the reverse when the man works more hours out of the home than the woman has no marked effect on the health of the female of the species.

The only exception is if the male is out of work. Then both members of the partnership suffer, Stolzenberg says, because of those old traditional gender expectations about the man as the bread winner.