Stress, Gender and Time Use

This paper investigates the gender aspect of stress within a welfare state regime with high employment rates for both women and men. By applying an economic model, an extended model and a stress-level model, we find that higher incomes lead to stress among women and men, confirming findings for Australia, Germany, Canada, Korea and the U.S. The number of working hours in the labour market, however, has no impact on stress. For working women, household work decreases the likelihood of their being stressed, while rush-hours work as stressors for women and men. Moreover, the more satisfied women are with their economic situation, the less likely is their reporting of stress. The same holds true for satisfaction with the number of hours--and even more for men. These results underline the importance of including satisfaction information when analysing the presence of stress in developing countries.