'Masculinity top safety barrier'

Article here. Excerpt:

'As the wife of a Canberra construction worker, I have every hope that the ACT government inquiry into safety in the building industry will be successful in identifying causes and proposing implementable solutions. As someone who has worked in the health sector, however, I am not optimistic.

There is no simple or single underlying cause of the cavalier attitude towards occupational health and safety which is evident on many construction sites, and it will be the job of the inquiry to uncover as many of these causes as possible. While some attention has been given to issues such as the quality of training and workers being pushed to meet cost and time deadlines, the one aspect of the current culture which has remained unrecognised is gender.

We know that gender influences how men and women think about and behave in relation to health and health promotion. The role of gender in health is so intrinsic that it has even been said that ''the doing of health is the doing of gender''. Men have a concept of health which is similar to the holistic indigenous concept of overall physical, mental and emotional wellbeing. Men also think of health in the sense of being in control and having power over their bodies.'