Occupational Gender Segregation and Mental Health among Professionals: Women’s Risk Exposure in Five Micro Classes

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

In this paper, the authors challenge the theory that women's lower pay is compensated by better working conditions, by demonstrating that in fact professions which are dominated by women (such as medical professions) frequently have higher incidences of stressors than categories dominated by men (such as STEM professions).

Although the paper does not directly examine financial compensation, it's still very interesting and makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the experiences of women working in professional positions in Europe.

I have a few important notes, organized by section, and then some more minor issues and suggestions.

Introduction:

The authors are discussing the experiences of "women" in the workplace. Based on this framing, it sounds as though these experiences and changes in employment patterns are global in nature. However, I don't believe this is explicitly stated, and it's unclear to me that the studies cited would justify this conclusion. If the authors are discussing global trends, this should made explicit. If not, they should explain to which groups of women (i.e., which countries or geographic regions) their review of the literature applies.

Methods:

It would be useful to know more about 1) how the survey was conducted, and to which groups of women the results should be expected to generalize, and 2) exactly how the mental risk item was constructed, including the text of the item. This could be a part of an appendix, but I think readers would find it useful.

It's important to know more about the regression models. Were there sampling weights, and if so were these used? Did the model account for nesting of responses within larger groups (if this was an issue)? There's some information missing which the reader requires, even if it's in an appendix.

Some of the numbers reported in the tables are hard to understand. Looking at Tables 8 and 8.2, how do both of these have the same number of observations, when one purports to show results for full-time workers and one for part-time workers? Similarly, Table 8 and 9 are supposed to show workers without Sunday work/shifts and those with, but they both have the same n? 

Minor notes:

There appears to be a missing sentence at the top of page 6

It's not entirely clear to me why managers (or associate professionals, clearical support workers, and service workers) were excluded from this analysis, since the arguments for looking at professionals seem like they would largely apply to these other groups. On the other hand, I understand the value of restricting the scope of the analysis.

Why were harassment or bullying and lack of autonomy not included in the analysis? The authors may have good reasons for this discussion (they know the theory better than I do), but those seem like they might be relevant. Also, are there any data about what "other" risk factors respondents identified?

I would be interested in seeing the full models, possibly in an appendix. It would be useful to see what the other regression coefficients were, although I appreciate the way the authors focus on the relevant details.

The authors should consider computing adjusted means for each of the groups. It would be easier to make sense of the differences reported if we also knew the incidence among STEM workers

I don't think dy/dx is a good column name, I would suggest something more like "difference in probabilities"

I don't understand the scale used for the y-axis. What's the rationale for having it go to .7?

p-values should not be reported as 0.000, those shuld be < .001, unless this is a journal-specific formatting issue.

The authors argue that "These risks coalesce into a constellation of 'work-induced” forms of strains,' which can be categorized as 'class-based.'". However, it's not clear to me that the groups they created are really reflective of class. For example, it seems to me that medical doctors are more similar to, say, mathematicians in terms of class than they are to nursing and midwivery professionals. Similarly, it seems that legal professionals are traditionally thought of as occupying the same class as people in the STEM related positions. I would be cautious about calling these class differences. However, this is outside my field and I could be wrong.

The authors claim that "it was possible to identify a source of occupation-based inequality that is a more pressing issue for women than men." Since they did not look at data from men, how is it possible to claim that this is "a more pressing issue for women than men"?

Author Response

Thank you very much for taking the time to review this manuscript. Please find the detailed responses below and the corresponding revisions/corrections highlighted/in track changes in the re-submitted files. As you can see we received all comments reviewers made and all modifications to the revised manuscript were made in accordance to such comments. We also created an appendix that contains additional information, as requested by reviewers. We wish to thank the reviewers for their helpful comments

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The manuscript “Occupational Gender Segregation and Mental Health Among Professionals. Women's Risk Exposure in Five Micro Classes” focuses on an important topic. The manuscript is well written and clear, so I think it should be accepted for publication. However, before that, I suggest changes.

Tables are not always referenced in the body of the text. For example, as Table 1 stands, we don't realize which part of the text it refers to. I suggest you put it in the text (see Table 1). The same suggestion applies to all other tables that are not mentioned in the text.

There is some confusion between the variable’s “sex” and “gender” throughout the text. When we talk about “sex”, we're talking about “males” and “females”; when we talk about “gender”, we're talking about “men” and “women” (and not males and females, as mentioned in Table 1).

In Table 4 you talk about “gender composition of grouped occupations” but then you mention "Sex" and "Male" and "Female". Please clarify whether you are talking about "Gender" or "Sex".

It's not clear whether Table 2 refers to all workers or whether it only refers to the female workers to whom this section centered on “…within-gender differences” refers.  If the information in Table 2 refers to workers in general, I see little relevance in this table. It would be better if the data were disaggregated by sex or gender.

It's not clear how you arrived at H1 and H2. The hypotheses should be better supported in the literature.

Regarding the Method, I would prefer to see the four traditional subsections (Participants, Procedure, Instruments/material, and Data analysis), because then the information about the Method would be clearer.

 Instead of Graphs, I suggest you say Figures (e.g., Figure 1, Figure 2…).

 If the data only relates to women, don't you think that the title of the tables and figures should make this clear in the results section? The same question arises regarding the text.

It seems to me that you've started the discussion of the results even before the end of the Results section (e.g., referring to the hypotheses verified) and that in the Discussion you already present the conclusions. To make it clearer, I suggest that you present the results in the Results section, the results discussion in the Discussion section, and the main conclusions in a Conclusions section. As the discussion is now written, it is not a real discussion of the results in the light of the theory.

Finally, I suggest that you revise the references according to the norms of the journal.

Author Response

Thank you very much for taking the time to review this manuscript. Please find the detailed responses below and the corresponding revisions/corrections highlighted/in track changes in the re-submitted files. As you can see we received all comments reviewers made and all modifications to the revised manuscript were made in accordance to such comments. We also created an appendix that contains additional information, as requested by reviewers. We want to thank the reviewers for their helpful comments. In the following pages, we will discuss how we decided to proceed by including their insights in the final revised version of the paper.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf