Study: Workers' Stress Much Higher Than Bosses
July 17 -- — Here's the scene: You've just settled in for your day's work and the boss is already scurrying around, trying to stay one step ahead of disaster, looking like a mental breakdown is just around the corner. But in your heart of hearts, you know you're under a lot more stress than that busy exec, even if all you've got to do is stuff a few envelopes and type a few letters.
It turns out that you're probably right, according to a new study showing that workers on the lower rungs of the socioeconomic ladder suffer more stress on the job than their superiors.
Various stress tests revealed that high and intermediate level supervisors in the British civil service system suffered less stress throughout the work day than their worker bees, both men and women, although the picture is a bit murky for women.
Women Execs Have More Stress
Researchers from several European universities monitored 202 clerical workers and supervisors for a day, measuring their blood pressure and pulse every 20 minutes from the time they woke up in the morning to the end of the day. Both blood pressure and pulse are reliable indicators of stress.
In addition, the researchers stuffed cotton balls in the mouths of their subjects every 30 minutes to collect cortisol, a stress hormone present in saliva, and that's what clouded the results.
Both blood pressure and pulse were higher for both men and women among the worker bees, and lower among the managers and executives.
But for women, the cortisol was higher in female executives than in their charges. In a paper published in the current issue of Psychosomatic Medicine, the researchers say they don't know why the results should have been different for men than women in the cortisol test.
One "relevant factor may be the experience of women working in higher status jobs," the researchers speculate in their paper, authored by Andrew Steptoe of the University College London, and colleagues from The Netherlands and Germany. That suggests that women who had to claw their way past the glass ceiling, and fight like the dickens to stay there, are under more stress than men who have achieved equal status.
Related Stories
ABC News Live